A Cortlandt Manor couple claims that the previous owners of their house and a real estate broker concealed a major water leak.
Brett and Jasmine Dipillo accused Joseph Beirne, Tanesha T. O’Connor, and Houlihan Lawrence Inc. of fraudulent inducement, in a complaint filed on Jan. 30 in Westchester Supreme Court.
The defendants said a water line had been repaired and was in good working condition when the house was sold, the complaint states, when actually it was “in a state of complete and total deterioration, and was beyond repair, and in need of replacement.”
The 2,200-square-foot house has three bedrooms and three bathrooms on a 4.8-acre lot on Rocky Ridge Road. Beirne and O’Connor bought it in 2020 for $570,000.
They hired Houlihan Lawrence to sell the house, and according to the deed the DiPillo’s bought it for $730,000.
The sellers knew that a water pipe between the house and the town’s water line was defective, according to the complaint. They depicted the leak as minor and they agreed to repair or replace the pipe at their sole cost.
When the buyers and sellers met at the closing in October 2023, the sellers allegedly presented a plumber’s bill indicating that a small patch had fixed the problem.
After the DiPillos moved in, the complaint states, they discovered that the pipe still leaked and was beyond repair. In March 2024 they began receiving “unexpectedly high water bills.”
The DiPillos are seeking an unspecified but “substantial sum of money” for the time and effort spent discovering the pipe’s actual condition, repair and replacement costs, and emotional damages.
Beirne and O’Connor moved to Charlotte, North Carolina. Efforts to find contact information, to ask for their side of the story, were unsuccessful.
A Houlihan Lawrence spokeswoman stated in an email that the real estate brokerage “has been dutifully serving our clients for over 135 years. We are confident in our business practices and represent our buyer and seller clients with integrity.”
