No Price Cuts for Them

The information used in your “Sitting on Empty Nests” article from Kathy Dantagnan, vice president of marketing for Urban West Communities, was not accurate.

An accurate statement would have been, “In Moorpark, builder Urban West Communities slashes $40,000 off the price of the final 32 homes immediately after selling the first 22 homes at their highest asking price.”

The information was given to you by Urban West in a manner clearly designed to mask the large losses suffered by the first 22 home buyers (we call ourselves the “First 22”) in the Creekside II development through the unexpected and dramatic price cuts made by Urban West.

The First 22 closed escrow between Sept. 6 and Nov. 10, 1989. Urban West’s $40,000 price cuts were first advertised in your newspaper Nov. 11. Urban West deliberately misled some of us and applied excessive escrow closing pressure on others before the company slashed its prices. This was done solely to retain the larger profits from their sales to us.

Urban West has the legal right to price its homes in any way it chooses. There are no statutes or regulatory rules that apply to the pricing of new single-family homes. However, we have the legal right to publicly disclose our experience and we fully intend to do so. Our appeals to Urban West have yielded no tangible results.

We believe that the home buying public has a right to know that their purchases are strictly “buyer beware” transactions. We hope you share our public awareness philosophy.

On behalf of the First 22,

ROGER AND LINDA MAHNKE

Moorpark

Editor’s note: Urban West responds that the last escrow involving a buyer who received no price reduction closed Oct. 26.