Q: I purchased a house a few months ago. The listing said it was a full concrete basement and I had no reason to believe otherwise.
Recently, I found water in my basement and when I removed some of the wall panelling, I discovered that my basement was not full concrete at all, but had been made of concrete blocks. There was lots of patching on them and those patches had been covered up by the wall board. There had also been material placed over the visible foundation on the outside to hide the concrete blocks.
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Is there anything I can do about this?
A: Most of us have heard the term buyer beware, or its Latin equivalent, caveat emptor. That means a house buyer is expected to inspect it completely and accept its condition when making the offer to purchase.
Many offers that realtors use have the explicit wording, “the buyer, having inspected the premises…” It is understood that the buyer will check out the property as it exists.
If there are cracks in the driveway, holes in the carpet or blotches in the paint, these things can be discussed with the seller, and if necessary, repaired prior to the deal going through.
In many cases, the potential buyer will use those deficiencies to ask for a lower price from the seller. In real estate law, these types of defects or deficiencies are called patent defects.
That means they are obvious and can be seen upon a reasonable and careful inspection.
However, the defects you have described are not patent. You could not reasonably have found that the basement of your house was made of a different material than was represented, and that there was damage to the basement that had been patched, unless you took the panelling off the basement walls.
That is not the sort of inspection that you should have to do to find out the building’s condition. If you can establish that the seller knew about a problem but did not tell you about it, there is a latent or hidden defect.
Defects that reasonably careful inspection will not reveal are not the kind of problems that buyers should have to accept.
If you are able to establish that the previous owner knew about the problem, and deliberately kept that information from you or took some effort to hide it, you may be able to get some compensation if what you bought is worth less than what it looked like.
Unfortunately, even if there is good evidence that there were latent defects that the seller knew about, and the buyer has suffered a loss, it will often mean that the buyer will have to take the seller to court to be compensated for this loss.
If you do find yourself in such a situation as a buyer, take lots of pictures, document what your contractors say about the cost to fix the problem and try to get written estimates.
Discuss the matter with a lawyer and act quickly so you can be sure to come within the limitation periods for starting a court action in your province.
