A Harrison couple who paid $1.8 million for a new home are suing a South Salem developer for allegedly building a house riddled with defects.
Paul and Angela Gerardi are demanding $150,000 from Vito DiMatteo and Immobiliaire Assets LLC, in a complaint filed on Oct. 21 in Westchester Supreme Court.
They “moved into what they believed would be a safe and properly constructed home for their young family,” the complaint states. “What followed instead was a cascade of failures.”
The house is a 5-bedroom, 5-bath 4,000-square-foot structure on Winfield Avenue that the Zillow online real estate database estimates is worth more than $1.7 million.
In 2020, Immobiliaire bought a 0.3-acre vacant lot for $462,500, according to a property record. Twenty weeks later, according to the lawsuit, the Gerardis agreed to pay Immobiliaire $650,000 for the land and $1,163,000 to build a house.
In 2022, the couple moved in. A year later, a hardwood floor buckled in their toddler’s bedroom, the complaint states. They claim they discovered a punctured water pipe behind a shower tile and improper grouting that allowed water to flow continuously into the wall and onto the subfloor beneath the floorboards. The defects were patched but allegedly failed quickly.
Since then, the Gerardis claim, they have found more defects. The basement allegedly flooded two years after they moved in because of an incorrectly sized drain, Window frames warped due to missing insulation and caulk, and some windows were not made of tempered glass. Paving stone around a swimming pool and patio cracked and shifted. Drywall cracked and hardwood separated. High levels of mold were detected and the house had to be fumigated.
The Gerardis say they paid DiMatteo an extra $75,000 for repairs and upgrades. After moving in, they have paid substantial sums on remediation and repairs, and they expect to incur more expenses.
After years of costly inconveniences, repairs, heath risks and expenses “for remediation that should never have been necessary in a properly built house,” the Gerardis exclaim, they “are staring at significant future expenses just to make the house normal.”
They accused Immobiliaire and DiMatteo of breach of contract, violating an implied warranty on a new home, misrepresentation, and unjust enrichment. They also accused DiMatteo of fraudulent inducement for allegedly portraying a defective house as complete.
Efforts to find contact information for Immobiliaire and DiMatteo, to ask for their side of story, failed.
The Gerardis are represented by attorneys Lee J. Lefkowitz and Matthew T. Behrens of Zarin & Steinmetz, White Plains.
