Exclusive | Homeowners sue trendy startup over alleged faulty construction if workers even built their houses at all: Nightmare
A team of tech execs has come under fire for allegedly building faulty homes in the Hudson Valley — or failing to build them at all.Founded in 2020, Welcome Homes was the brainchild of DigitalOcean founders Alec Hartman and Ben Uretsky, along with Hartman’s brother Marc Hartman.According to multiple lawsuits, the tech-based home construction company took hundreds of thousands of dollars from customers, only to leave them with unfinished and poorly constructed frames or, in at least one instance, a muddy pit.
“These were millennial tech bros who had relationships with venture capitalists and appeared successful, having taken a cloud-based tech company public,” Rena Adams, a plaintiff in one of the lawsuits, told The Post.“The tech angle and guarantees sucked us in.”Originally headquartered in New York, the Welcome Homes team started off with $5.35 million from a seed round in the summer of 2020.
In January 2021, HGTV’s Anthony Carrino, former cohost of “Kitchen Cousins,” joined the company as vice president of design.Carrino left the company in January 2024 and is not accused of wrongdoing.Welcome Homes aimed to digitize home building, initially offering brand-new stick-builts in the tri-state area outside New York City, allowing customers to do everything from purchase land to pick out faucets on its website.
It offered a range of home models and promised to complete them in six months.(While spec houses are often built in about that time, custom homes tend to take an average of 14 months, according to Realtor.com.)A year in, the company’s six-month assurance was replaced on its website with another promise normally unheard of in home building: a guaranteed price stated in each customer’s signing contract.Now, plaintiffs in the lawsuits claim that Welcome Homes failed to deliver on its guarantees.All three suits accuse Welcome Homes of fraud.In one lawsuit, filed in September 2024 with the New York State Supreme Court in upstate Ulster Coun...