Suing a contractor

thank you chris john. i am a contractor and have never been sued nor have i ever received a letter from an attorney but i have had to deal with a lot of nonsense in commercial buildings and have learned a few things along the way:

what i have learned is that there is a way to embarrass people (in this case city officials) into doing things; learn a lot about their job responsibilities (or their agency’s responsibilities) and ask them questions. let them listen to their own answers and ask more questions directed at their answers. by doing this, we can lead them to places and make them aware that if they do not respond to the issue, they will appear incompetent and unfit to hold that position. (this is something you learn dealing with union employees who will sometimes do whatever they can to get out of taking responsibility; the same with a lot of civil servants; they can get nasty when you corner them and contractors will get nasty and vilify you. and if you are female, it is worse).

after working in the residential system for about two decades and now w orking as a home inspector, i am long tired of hearing stories about incompetent contractors taking advantage of homeowners (as a contractor i had to compete against them and they sell a lot of bs; it is not fair to everyone – other contractors and homeowners alike). the city knows this is going on but it is as if they do not want to fix it. Why? Because if they fix it, they will create competition (for talented contractors and tradespeople) between homeowners in the boroughs and the well-connected real estate developers in Manhattan and as we know, our mayors and elected officials are beholden to wealthy developers (they do not give a crap about us; we are on our own).

i will let people know, it is difficult to get someone from the director of consumer affairs office on the phone. i tried a couple of years ago over a large issue and could not get them and a few weeks back I left a message because i needed clarification on a law and have yet to hear back. i do not have time to badger them but i am going to continue to focus on them and how they are failing homeowners. and when i enter retirement, i will make it my hobby.

After writing this here, i do want people to know, if someone hires me to prepare a report for their home, i am bound to them. i work for them and cannot share a report with anyone (this is a state law). So unless a homeowner has a problem that they ask me to use as an example, i cannot reveal anything i see in a house to anyone (including government agencies; i am bound to my customers).

Steve

“Do you have a contract” should be the fist question answered here; overcharge vs Charged and Not Performed are very different. The former is really tough to win against in court and the latter is near impossible without a written contract. I would also say, like HomeInspector, that the way he is responding makes it sounds like he has done this before and knows the system.

“Do you have a contract” should be the fist question answered here; overcharge vs Charged and Not Performed are very different. The former is really tough to win against in court and the latter is near impossible without a written contract. I would also say, like HomeInspector, that the way he is responding makes it sounds like he has done this before and knows the system.

I have been thinking about this more and more. did you say that they did not install certain things that they were paid to install? did you give them their final payment and then learned that these things had not been installed? do you have a written contract that specifies these things be installed?

why is consumer affairs not going after this?

i fault the city’s consumer protection laws and the dept of consumer affairs for allowing stuff like this to happen to homeowners.

unless there is more to this story that we are not being told, this should be a slam dunk.

you know what i am thinking, if you cannot get consumer affairs to go after this, maybe try putting pressure on them by going to the mayor’s office? Or to the council person who heads the Consumer Affairs Committee. badger these people.

we have to begin pressuring these people to do more to protect homeowners.

Can you find out where the money went? Did this person take any vacations during the course of this project? Or buy anything expensive or any personal items outside of things needed for work? I am a contractor. When i got my license and took the test, they made it sound as if we (legally) could not take customers funds for anything that was not directly related to keeping business operations going and keeping a job running. I have taken over jobs where customers have told me they “booted the contractor because every time (she) gave him a progress payment, he took a trip to florida”. I believe there is a fiduciary duty here with a customer’s money. Sadley, our dept of consumer affairs has no teeth but perhaps if you can prove he was using money on something else, maybe you can make a criminal complaint.

By the way, someone misrepresented something with me years ago (in nassau county). I called the nassau county da’s office and they listened to my story and said write this up and send it in and we will see if it can be prosecuted as a criminal case. I called the person who misrepresented something and i told them i spoke to the da’s office. That person could not wait to get that money back to me.

Study the law regarding a contrators responsibility with a customer’s money and see if you can make it a criminal case.

Also, know that outside of nyc, the nys ag’s office investigates these complaints. Of course, here we have the department of consumer affairs. I would perhaps call the ag’s office and see if someone can tell you what you can do on your own if you cannot get traction out of nyc consumer affairs. You have to go this on your own and you have to keep pushing buttons until you find one that works.

No good contractor would allow this to happen. if this person allowed this to happen to their spouse’s friend, they have other issues in their life and i would venture to suspect money is not the least of them. and if op’s friend is indeed a true friend, that contractor now has marital problems as well. good luck suing him.

Did you file complaint to better business bureau? Did any of the allegedly completed work involve materials backed by manufacturers warranty? If so, have you contacted the manufacturer to ask them to persuade the contractor to correct/complete the work or send a different contractor to do so (this 2nd contractor part might merely be used as a pressure point of motivation for manufacturer/contractor).
I have taken both of the above actions with reasonable success.

My general advice is do everything you can to restrain your personal reactions and to calculate your actions from a purely business perspective. Burning bridges before resolution may not get you to your end goal here. Also consider as mentioned above that if you use your strongest legal threat and the person calls it a bluff then you are stuck taking a loss or acting on your expensive legal threat. I find that considering creative wording and motivating positions before going full lawyer up is sometimes helpful because it gives you chance to impress on your contractor adversary that you are ramping up your pre ssure reasonably and steadily. This can have the effect of the person taking more concern that you won’t let them find professional/financial rest until the matter is resolved in a reasonably quick amount of time.
Do you honestly want this person working on your place anymore? If your answer is no but you cannot afford (or do not want to afford) the scenario where the contractor 100% walks away with no further work, maybe consider renegotiating much smaller scope of work and try renegotiating prices, then complete remaining work with another contractor. This last idea can be pricey but cheaper than some of your alternatives. I hate having people work on properties if they are already uncooperative and unmotivated to finish. The liability of this is often not worth the risk

Thanks very much for this advice, 26%. I think I’ll look into a scary letter…

I’m so sorry this is happening to you. What would the lawyer be working with here? Did you have a written contract? Is 90k the actual amount of money you were defrauded or is that the total amount you paid him and only a portion of the work was performed? You certainly don’t need to hire $1000 an hour lawyer, but in this market, you’re going to be hard-pressed to find one willing to work on this for less than around $400-500 an hour, and it’s not a good candidate for contingency billing. It might make sense to engage a lawyer for the purpose of writing a letter for potential settlement purposes first instead of filing suit, which, as you suspect, will be costly. Basically the letter would lay out some of your position and say that you’re willing to negotiate a resolution in good faith, but if you don’t hear back, you’ll sue. Could call your bluff and ignore, but if it’s a scary enough letter, could also be just enough to make him want you to go away. Now, you could negotiate a flat fee for this letter, but it’s still going to cost at least a couple thousand dollars, I th ink, because it will need to have some level of detail so it has enough tooth to it, but will definitely be cheaper than having the lawyer draft a full-blown state court complaint. If the amount controversy is truly $90,000, then this is not a small claims court matter. You can try to go the pro se route, and New York supreme has a fairly helpful support office, but you’d really be out of your element as a non-attorney drafting a state law complaint, and at a huge disadvantage assuming the contractor decides to hire a lawyer of his own. If there is no written contract, the case will be very challenging.

this is going to be very difficult.

first question is, did you have a schedule of payments? was that $90k a down payment? progress payment? or final payment? if it was final, how did it get issued when the work was not done?

you realize if this person has no property, you will not recover this.

i have more to say about the department of consumer affairs and will do so elsewhere.