Here is the beginning of the series that involved Ames Alexander and Rick Rothacker in a lengthy examination of home building and buying in Charlotte, N.C.:

For those building the homes of Charlotte's future, times have never been so good. More than 60,000 new homes have sprouted in the Charlotte region during the past five years—and well over $8 billion has been spent on them. It's been the longest, strongest housing boom in the region's history.

But in this red-hot market, some home buyers are getting burned. When Karen and Craig Akins first crossed the threshold of their $425,000 home on Charlotte's southern edge five years ago, they fell in love with the place. They admired the stately entrance, the living room's 19-foot ceiling, the soothing golf course view.

The trouble started within the first year. The garage floor began sinking. So did the front stoop.

One by one, windows in their master bedroom blew out. Water seeped down the walls and into the basement. Worst of all, moisture crept behind the home's synthetic stucco surface and started to rot the framing. Total repair estimate: more than $100,000.

"This was like a dream house for us," Karen Akins says, her eyes filling with tears. ". .. It's just a major setback."

Across the Carolinas, thousands of homeowners have discovered problems with the new houses they bought to shelter their families and anchor their financial futures.

Home builders acknowledge that mistakes happen. As they strain to do all the business they can, builders are facing an acute labor shortage. Many are hiring workers with little or no experience.

But builders say most contractors do first-rate work and that houses are better built than ever. When problems slip through, they say, most builders are quick to correct them.

Still, buyers have every reason to be wary.

Public building inspectors in Mecklenburg are rejecting the work in four out of 10 inspections—far more than they used to. And even at that high failure rate, some significant construction flaws slip past. Individual inspectors sometimes do more than 60 inspections in a day. Across the region, most code enforcement departments have received the worst possible grades for residential inspections from a national rating company.

Fifteen percent of recent new home buyers say they had "major" problems with their builder, according to a new Observer poll, and 30 percent wouldn't recommend their builder to a friend. Other surveys show increasing dissatisfaction with workmanship.

Those who buy flawed houses often find there's little legal protection for their largest investment. Most Carolina construction laws favor builders and developers, leaving some buyers with steep repair bills.

"Never before in the home-buying experience has the advice ‘buyer beware' been any more important than it is now," says Don Faires, a private home inspector in Charlotte. "... You're really in a pretty risky position buying a new home. And that's a shame."

In an eight-month study, The Observer found defects in new homes ranging from leaky roofs to shifting foundations to walls in danger of collapse. Among the more alarming cases:

• Michael and Chona Hoy allege that serious defects in the construction of their fireplace led to a 1996 fire that destroyed their nine-month-old house in Iredell County.
  
  
• In the wet months, raw sewage flows across the backyard of Jerry McCaughtry's new house in Union County. He blames a faulty septic system, and says the builder and the state have done little to help.
  
  
• Alan and Anna Marie Nelsen vacated their $550,000 house in Mecklenburg's exclusive Peninsula neighborhood after an engineer reported that it was uninhabitable. Private inspectors found numerous code violations, including two walls that weren't properly supported. Repair estimates are so high the couple is thinking about tearing the house down and starting over.
  
  
• A Hickory family had to pay $28,000 to remove the remains of a new retaining wall that collapsed at their lakeside home. The builder was working without the required license.
  
  
• A south Charlotte home was built atop buried stumps and other organic debris, which environmental officials say has created potentially explosive pockets of methane gas next to the house.

(Reprinted with permission from The Charlotte Observer. Copyright owned by The Charlotte Observer.)

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Ames Alexander

The Home Buyer Beware Series

Reporting and Writing the Home Buyer Beware Series

Alexander says that the database they constructed "helped us confirm that construction flaws were widespread and building inspectors were swamped." He continues:

We also used a variety of Web sites. Among the most handy was one maintained by the National Association of Home Builders--www.nahb.org. The group collects reams of information on new homes and the companies that build them--including survey data on how builders cope with the labor shortage and how much profit they're pocketing.

The challenge of organizing a series like this one can be daunting. Typically, I'll spend several weeks reporting the big picture, trying to identify the main themes and stories. Fairly early in the course of reporting this project, we decided the key stories should focus on the widespread problems in new home construction; the cursory public inspections that often fail to detect such flaws; and the laws that provide little recourse to consumers when builders refuse to correct their mistakes. We also wanted to give readers an inside look at the many challenges confronting builders who must cope with labor shortages and tight deadlines as they attempt to meet the intense demand for new houses. Finally, we wanted to shed some light on what could be done about the problems. After organizing the project in that way, it became clear where Rick and I needed to focus most of our reporting.

Some advice for reporters planning a complex project:

• Be ready to invest some time. In the home construction project, there was no substitute for actually watching the nails get driven. Rothacker spent a week watching houses go up at a single subdivision. And Alexander spent another week attending a course on the building code. In both cases, it turned out to be time well spent.
  
  
• When dealing with government agencies, find out what computer databases might help you shed light on the issue you're exploring. In some cases, however, you or the newspaper's computer wizards will need to do some fancy computer work. Mellnik, the newspaper's database editor, untangled the unwieldy hierarchical database provided by Mecklenburg County, and put it in a form that allowed me to analyze it with Microsoft Access.
  
  
• It makes sense to get your photographers and graphics artists involved early on. William Pitzer's superb series of graphics showed how houses are built and what often goes wrong, adding depth and context to the project.

If you take on a project like this one, you'll probably find your time was well spent. After reading our home construction series, Mecklenburg County officials agreed to hire more inspectors and take other steps to reduce the high inspection failure rate. State lawmakers introduced several bills to better protect home buyers. And more than 250 readers contacted the Observer to thank us and share their stories.