We recently bought a home with some property in Baker County, FL. Seller failed to disclose (deliberately hid) some serious problems.
Inspectors must have seen these problems (unless they are blind) and failed to report them.
Surveyor provided misleading survey map and report.
Sellers real estate agent "dared" us to find anything wrong with the property.
Seller omitted serious problems from their disclosure report.
We have irrefutable proof the sellers (and everyone else) were not only aware of the problems but tried to conceal them.
These problems will cost a fortune to remediate and may force us to move, again.
Moving here was a major effort involving lots of trucks, trailers, 10 grand and a month of my life.
We paid top dollar ... a freakin' fortune ... for this property because of what it "appeared" to be.
We are seriously (I want to [violent verb] someone) pissed.
We are left with no alternative but to sue the bejesus out of everybody involved but we're having trouble finding a lawyer that will take this on in Baker County, FL.
Know anyone who might be interested or are you a lawyer interested in taking something like this on?

Thank you!!!!

Did you hire the inspectors yourself or do what 99% of people do and blindly use who your agent recommend?  Technically they are supposed to provide you with 3 names and you choose but its almost never the case, especially in this crazy market.
Also if you look in the contract you signed with the home inspector, one of the 20 pages of disclaimers will say they are only required to pay you up to the cost of the inspection. Also it will say the inspection is a "snapshot" in time and limited to a visual inspection.  I was a licensed inspector for a time and I took an average of 300 photos for my records so if someone complained later of say a dead outlet that I did not test I could review pictures to see of it was blocked by a couch or something.

Good luck with everything.  I'm currently dealing with a title company that missed very constricting deed restrictions on my lot and 3 others that is written like a damm  HOA and the property is in the country where other neighbors can do anything.

I am not trying to be a dick (here is where I am a dick), but the time to use an Attorney to begin with. A good RE Attorney will make sure that the language in the contract doesn't leave room for slippery fucks to slip out on.

That being said, O21 led you to a good site. I know what I am talking about (my wife is a RE Paralegal...deals with this shit every day. Class is around 6:30 every night. At dinner. Aaaaalll the stories)!

Good luck!! Nail their asses to the wall!

You can sue to reverse the sale, just be ready to prove the accusations. Do you think the seller still has the money or did they go on a shopping spree already?

Baker County is def the good ole boy network so find somebody plugged in.
Source..born and raised in Baker and my family pretty much owned Maclenny   at one point, lots of streets named after us  there still..

That's the rub. I hired my own inspectors for everything; main house, detached garage, all of the out buildings, basically the entire property was inspected. I even paid to have the septic pumped out and inspected. All of them were recommended by MY realtor out of JAX. Not sure how they managed to miss something this big and this obvious.


I'm finding all kinds of other things too like circuits run by a 5 year old so when I flip a light switch it blows multiple circuit breakers if another switch is flipped. I got knocked on my azz the other day when I found a broken (plastic/indoor) junction box laying in the dirt that had been run over by a lawn mower (or something). It had buried Romex connect to the septic pump shorting in what was left of the box. It apparently runs to a pine tree with an extension cord run up it to power a light?!


I almost got cut in half last week when the very heavy roll up garage door came crashing down because the chain came loose from the lift motor. The lift motor is coming loose from the wall because it was mounted with just regular bolts, not concrete anchor bolts, and it slides up the wall loosing the chain. The garage has hot sockets without covers, missing GFCs, no ground lines, no straps on EMT that isn't wall flush and water lines just run through the air without a single strap. I found a garden hose being used as a bleeder drain for the water cooled AC condenser! This place is a damn OSHA nightmare! If I were inspecting this place as a building inspector I'd have a 30 page hit list and start making the contractor rip stuff down and redo it.


I don't mind fixing all the BS little crap (former licensed CA contractor - Elec/AC/heat/general) but I'm really pissed about a failing 48" drainage pipe obviously installed to divert a stream feeding into the river so they could bring in fill dirt and build on what would otherwise be unusable property. Concealing something like this should be criminal! GRRRRR.


I do have a warranty from the main inspector but I doubt it's going to cover something like this huge pipe issue. The entire length of it is apparently failing and has been for sometime because there are huge holes opening up all along the length of it, the latest being about 20 feet from the house. I'm pretty damn sure the owners knew this was an issue and it's probably why they bailed out. I have aerial pictures (taken in April of this year) of them filling in the holes that are now re-appearing.

I did have my real estate attorney (from our former county) look over everything but it was all pretty standard Fl stuff. The disclosure letter though is a blatant attempt at concealing this problem. Just as soon as I find a lawyer from JAX that will take this on I'm going to have to go big guns on this. I don't know how much it will cost to fix this but I'd guess it's going to cost a small fortune and without it this property is worthless because it will eventually revert back to the surface stream it was before they put in the pipe and filled in the dirt.

We may have no choice but to move ... again. We've stopped unpacking at this point.
The seller moved across town about 3 miles away to what appears to be a larger piece of property (not on a river) they bought for about half the cost of this house so they basically eliminated their mortgage and a serious property issue ... At ... My ... Expense!

Or so they think. I have third party evidence of a clear attempt to conceal the issue and they failed to disclose the issue as required by law.