Taneise
Cedar Hill,#2Consumer Suggestion
Sun, August 20, 2006
Steve, I know exactly how you feel. Read my report on HWA and you will find out what I did to solve my problem. When we bought our home 3 months ago, HWA was reccommended by our real estate agent, boy was that a mistake. Now check this out, we paid the $410 dollars to start the warranty. They accepted the contract prior to us moving in. So I am thinking that once they have accepted and took our money that we are covered the day they accepted it. That's what it says on the letter. We had been in our home for a couple of weeks to a month and the pipe that connects to the washer(where the hot water heater system is, in our home it's in a storage room in the garage)had busted and leaked into a guest room. Water had seeped through the closet and everything. So here we go, we call HWA, explain the problem and they get the plumber to come out and take a look and they said so themselves that this is covered and all we need to do is let them know the issue and everything. Mind you, when we moved into the house of course there was no washer and dryer and so we had to buy a new set. The hwa rep came back and told us that because there had not been a washer and dryer set in the house, that it would not be covered. Can you believe that but yet it states in the contract that any type of leak except cause by nature is covered. To make a long story short, we went back and forth with them. Tried to reason with them without having to take it to our attorney. The reps were very rude and told us in so many words that they were not going to pay for it and that was that. Well, we were fed up. We took this to our attorney, did a little research ourselves on the company and found out that they had a lot of negative reports on them. Our attorney told us that has has had so many issues with Home Warranty of America that a class lawsuit will probably end up being filed. Once HWA saw that we were not backing down and we had a letter sent to them from our attorney. HWA offered us our full refund on our coverage and part of the additional money that we had to dish out to get the problem fixed. We did not even include the other additional funds it took for us to hire carpet cleaners to get the water up from the floor. So, if I was you, don't back down from this, if you have an attorney tell him the situation and I guarantee you will see results. It doesn't make sense to pay 400-500 dollars on home warranty and yet when you have the problem, they don't want to fix it. I am not saying that all home warranties are like this because before we moved we had Total Home Protect. What we have decided to do is just put back extra money for these types of problems and just pay for it ourselves. It just seems to be better for us that way. It least we know that we can get things fixed without hassles. Again, some people like having home warranties which is fine. I don't knock anybody that has it because it can be beneficial but for me, it is just to much of a hassle to go back and forth with a company that really doesn't honor their word or contract. Waste of time and money and I do not like for my money to be wasted!!