All Forum Posts by: Zaki Naveed

A “good” attorney will most certainly cost good money. Be aware that even if you prevail and win your case, you will still need to be awarded a judgment. Once and if you get a judgment, you will still have to perfect it by collecting on it.

Based on the information you provided about the contractor’s financial condition, collection seems unlikely.

Sometimes it is best to take a loss and gain by the lessons it brings. So, choose your path wisely.

The reality that GC1 has created needs to be dealt with. Bringing in a new GC creates a situation of its own.

You need to be extremely careful about how you mitigate your exposure to fixing legal contractual obligations to the new contractor to ensure it’s scope of services and remedies should problems arise in completing the job.

In closing, I urge you not to feel too bad or blame yourself for the situation. We all make mistakes and need to learn from them.

I made a similar mistake and did it with decades of ground up development experience.

I was building my private residence. I bought the contractor’s sob story and paid him 50% upfront. He bought a new truck and didn’t pay his crew.

I was able to get about even in terms of his work completed and pay and threw him off the job. I called a sheriff to do a citizen standby to make sure that the contractor couldn’t follow through on his threats to take a hammer to the job.

Feel free to contact me if you’d like to talk about this further and best of luck in getting this resolved.

Thank you for your detailed response! The GC gave me a very sweet deal and since my agent had good experiences with him, I went with it. I am waiting to get new quotes from other contractors but I have a feeling they will charge double his cost. He has spent 10-15k on the job at best. So he owes me 20k easily. Not sure if I will spend more money trying to get that back via legal measures or not.

0 Votes

Memphis, Tennessee

Quote from @Sean Goodwin:

I had a similar issue in Memphis about 6 months ago. I would consult legal advice immediately. I used a lawyer out of Knoxville and was very satisfied with her. Ill DM you her information.

Did you have a written contract with him?

I did, but it does not state a deadline. Thanks for the DM!

0 Votes

Memphis, Tennessee

Hi,

This my first time using the biggerpockets website. I just started my real estate journey and bought my first house that my wife and I, and our 1 year old were planning on moving into 3 weeks ago. We were getting it remodeled and hired and a contractor through our real-estate agent. The contractor just stopped after the demolition and for the past month and a half has been doing very little, that too through subcontractors here and there. My real estate agent is helping me find other contractors and says that this contractor has never behaved like this before.

The issue is, I fell for his traps and gave him 75% of the payment (around 35k) because he kept saying he needed it to get done soon and I did not want to extend my lease too much because it was very expensive to do so. So that was a big mistake. I think he might have personal issues going on and does not have the money to continue working on my job whilst he is probably working on another job. He says his children are sick but this happened way before this matter.

I think the best thing would be to take legal action because he says there is very little to give back even though barely a third of the job is done. So I need some advice. I have never had any legal issues before so this is my first time going through this process. If someone here can give me advice on how to go about hiring a law firm/lawyer, what to expect and if someone knows a good lawyer who deals with these issues in Memphis TN, that would be extremally helpful!

Thank you

1 Vote

Memphis, Tennessee

All Forum Posts by: Zaki Naveed

Zaki Naveed has started 1 posts and replied 3 times.

Post: Legal advice regarding issues with a contractor

Post: Legal advice regarding issues with a contractor

Post: Legal advice regarding issues with a contractor