Shrinkwrap Contracts for Housing
Posted on June 25, 2005
We are used to hidden clauses in software shrinkwrap, but apparently it happens in the “real world” too. Luckily, the purchaser in this case insisted that the relevant clauses be removed from the contract, which was lucky because they didn’t perform as required and would have got away with it otherwise:
When the reader complained after his final walkthrough of the house, he was told there was nothing he could do because, basically, the arbitration clause would not allow him to sue. “This very smug woman who managed the builder’s office was telling me in a teacher-to-child voice that the missing features had been deleted from the plans at their discretion,” he recalls. “‘I really understand that you might be upset,’ she was saying to me, ‘but that’s the way it is and you really can’t do anything about it.’ She was a bit shocked when I pointed out that my sales contract in fact didn’t include the arbitration clause, and even more shocked when I called the builder directly and cancelled the contract for non-performance. That afternoon they began adding the promised features, even though they had to tear it down a bit to do so.”
Link.
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