Iain Hall from Edenwold/Balgonie is one of those people.
He took a lot of people for a lot of money and the laws in Saskatchewan protect him.

All we can do is put up a website to warn others.

http://badbuilder.ca

Unless it’s a contractor/builder you trust with your life, NEVER give up control of the money unless the work has been done. If a contractor needs a deposit, put it in a joint escrow account, no less! If a contractor/builder tells you he needs money to buy materials, RUN!!!!

Anyone who has been in business for a fair amount of time has accounts with every supplier from here to Timbuktu and those accounts are usually 30 day pay on invoice. So the contractor might not need to pay for the materials for 30-60 days after they receive the materials depending on the time of month.

If a contractor/builder won’t do a job without money up front, there are other builders and other neighborhoods to choose from. Never let someone get ahead of you when it comes to money on a construction project. It’s not necessary, I don’t care how big or small the builder is. If they want to do business, especially these days, they will accommodate a client so hard earned money is safe.

I can understand a builder wanting deposits to start a home so they don’t get stuck with a house that they can’t sell. Simple, the buyer puts the money into a joint escrow held by their attorney and the checks can’t be cashed without joint signatures of the buyer and the builder. There can also be triggers written into the deal so a party can't tie up an escrow account without merit.

I don’t do business with someone if I’m not confident I’m going to get paid. I have a very low bad debt ratio every year and it’s because I’m careful. Be paranoid and protect your money on both sides of the fence.

I’m in the U.S. For people wishing to avoid this problem in the U.S. I recommend hadd.com. This org provided info to me during our case that was very useful, and I don’t know that we’d have been able to recover our damages in settlement as successfully as we did without this org.

There is a very good reason people make gripe sites; they can’t get anywhere with the usual complaints to BBB’s and govt agencies, and the builder knows it, so they stonewall the customer. Plus, the BBB’s, state agencies, and so on, do not always make all complaints public info. Most people find out this gem of information after their own complaint is kept under wraps.

During my case I met many intelligent, rational, well educated people who got taken by bad builders. (Networking can really be helpful.) A few contractors were also among those taken by bad builders. (And now, it’s getting more and more common for contractors to do work for builders and not get paid, either.) Among the homeowers were engineers, real estate agents, lawyers who represented many builders in their practice, a judge, teachers, soldiers, and basically people from all walks of life. As they described the research they did before buying a pattern emerged: they were told there were no complaints by BBB’s and state agendies, when in fact there were. And they only found out about the hidden complaints by practically becoming detectives to do the necessary work to support and fight their own cases.

When not even industry insiders and lawyers who supposedly ‘know’ the local builders can avoid it, what chance does the average consumer have of really knowing? Sometimes home made gripe sites and consumer org’s are all you have to rely on. So if someone makes a gripe site it just might be the only thing you have to go on, and where there’s smoke there’s usually fire.

A few years ago I had a roofing company contact me about damage to me roof after a hail storm. He told me he had been cruising the neighborhood looking for damaged roofs. He told me if I called my insurance company he would meet with them to show the adjustor the damage. I did and they did. I told him that before I hired them I would need references. He gladly gave me several and I contacted all of them. They all gave honest and detailed information.

I hired the company, they did excellent work and billed my insurance company. For a while I received reference calls and I told them of my experience and offered to have them come look at my roof. A few did.

Moral of the story, get references and check them out.

To OP, it would be more useful if you posted some details so we all could learn what can go wrong while building a house.

This all seems to have happened about a year after we bought the property. I shudder to wonder what the crawlspace looks like. Can legal action be taken against a builder if things like this happen. We later found out from our realtor and later the selling agent that the builder/seller took a loss on the three properties which the bank sold as short sales and the builder took off to another state.