Why are homes in NE Florida not concrete block or have a stucco exterior? (Jacksonville: fit in, real estate)

[LFJourney]

Originally Posted by ShakenStirred

Stucco is vastly inferior to siding in a hot, humid climate such as Florida. It is a masonry product which is porous, and all stucco cracks (including the microfractures that you can't see) no matter what. It then absorbs vast amounts of moisture during rainstorm, high humidity (most of the year), and the inevitable sprinklers that will hit the wall. As the wall heats up during the day, you get lots of vapor transmission from the stucco into the wall cavity, as the interior of the home is usually much cooler and want to bring that moisture into the home. Hot always travels to cold when it comes to moisture vapor. The walls of stucco are flat, thereby increasing the chance that water creeps into these fractures and gets driven inwards.

With siding, you have a natural angle channeling water away from the home, and the overlap on the siding panels gives it a redundancy for pushing water away from the home that you simply can't get with stucco.

That said, the "real" reason most builders have switched to it in NE Florida is because of the insanely massive amount of lawsuits they are fighting as we speak, and these lawsuits are comprised of all the construction that was built during the days of stucco. Stucco can be done to manage moisture properly, but none of the houses in NE Florida were done that way. Quick, fast installation, coupled with poor WRB (Weather Resistive Barrier) installations, and stucco that was applied to thin, poor window installations...it was all a recipe for disaster and the chickens came home to roost.

Hardie (or Nichiha, my preference) lap siding has far superior rain shedding capabilities and in my opinion, also looks a lot better than all the cookie cutter homes you see in the big Orlando communities, which are now starting to get hammered with lawsuits as well. Pulte Home in particular is getting hit hard in communities where the homes were 1st floor block, 2nd floor wood framed.

I have many, many older posts regarding the construction techniques in NE Florida which you can feel free to go back and peruse.

Bottom line: I would not ever own a stucco home in Florida, ever. It will leak at some point.

SS

Thank you very much for your fantastic explanation and insight into stucco versus siding from a professional point-of-view. Both of my homes that I previously owned are stucco so I am familiar with it from a homeowner's standpoint. I don't exactly love it by any stretch of the imagination either. I've never seen siding in person to be able to compare or form an opinion about it as a homeowner, but everything that you state has given me a lot to think about.

I was aware that there were stucco lawsuits, but I thought that was resolved many years ago. Apparently not because I just Googled it and was surprised to see this is still an ongoing issue.

I'll definitely look at your older posts, and I'm very grateful for you offering your expertise in this matter.

[LFJourney]

Originally Posted by socalbee

I do notice when looking at new stucco homes that our stucco is much thicker more textured than those built now.

I appreciate this comment because I'll make sure to look at the thickness of stucco the next time I look at a new home. The stucco on my house that was built in 1992 seemed really thick to me. I know this because I had to have my stucco cut a few years after the house was built so that I could get a termite bond. I'm just amazed that stucco was a big issue 30 years ago and obviously still is today.

[socalbee]

Originally Posted by LFJourney

I appreciate this comment because I'll make sure to look at the thickness of stucco the next time I look at a new home. The stucco on my house that was built in 1992 seemed really thick to me. I know this because I had to have my stucco cut a few years after the house was built so that I could get a termite bond. I'm just amazed that stucco was a big issue 30 years ago and obviously still is today.

Stucco is one thing, but Copper piping is another. There are so many home here with slab leaks that were built with copper piping. That is another thing to look for. Not an issue after 2001.

[DovieHarding]

Everything depends on materials and application...strong base coat, skim coat, finish coat, drying, flex agents, quality of specific exterior-grade paints and how the final coats are applied......many of these bozos SPRAY the exterior paint without ROLLING it own in addition - that's a bad bad application - it also depends on what kind of "texturing" or skip-troweling , etc ......it's called knowing your trade and materials.....

[socalbee]

People like new homes, so they can tell their friends, BUT we have been looking to downsize for about 4 years now. ALL and I mean all the homes we looked at had what I considered poor or shoddy construction in one or more areas. Oh, I am an Engineer, so I am a little picky. No homes except one development that we looked at had homes we would consider buying. This was Margaritaville in Daytona Beach, but it had one other detrimental feature that was intolerable for us, the constant piping of Buffett music.

We think we will stick to homes that were built by reputable builders after 2002 and before 2019. They appear to be the best constructed, at least in our area. When buying a home, you should get a proper structural survey done, NOT the crappy cookie cutter survey recommended by all realtors. Yes, it cost more, but then quality always does.

The only way to go nowadays to get quality construction is with a reputable custom builder where you can set the standards (and pay for them), and have an independent inspector review the process with your standards in mind. Like EVERYTHING, you ONLY get what you pay for.

[LFJourney]

Originally Posted by DovieHarding

Everything depends on materials and application...strong base coat, skim coat, finish coat, drying, flex agents, quality of specific exterior-grade paints and how the final coats are applied......many of these bozos SPRAY the exterior paint without ROLLING it own in addition - that's a bad bad application - it also depends on what kind of "texturing" or skip-troweling , etc ......it's called knowing your trade and materials.....

Thanks for your comment. Are there actually builders that roll exterior paint over the stucco?
My guess is their subcontractors only spray...unfortunately for the homeowner. I can't remember what they did on my new construction home 30 years ago, but I had it painted probably 5 or 7 years after living there, and I specifically picked my contractor because he'd roll the paint and not spray it. And the scary thing for a buyer of a new home is you don't know the expertise of the subcontractors the builder uses!

[LFJourney]

Originally Posted by socalbee

People like new homes, so they can tell their friends, BUT we have been looking to downsize for about 4 years now. ALL and I mean all the homes we looked at had what I considered poor or shoddy construction in one or more areas. Oh, I am an Engineer, so I am a little picky. No homes except one development that we looked at had homes we would consider buying. This was Margaritaville in Daytona Beach, but it had one other detrimental feature that was intolerable for us, the constant piping of Buffett music.

We think we will stick to homes that were built by reputable builders after 2002 and before 2019. They appear to be the best constructed, at least in our area. When buying a home, you should get a proper structural survey done, NOT the crappy cookie cutter survey recommended by all realtors. Yes, it cost more, but then quality always does.

The only way to go nowadays to get quality construction is with a reputable custom builder where you can set the standards (and pay for them), and have an independent inspector review the process with your standards in mind. Like EVERYTHING, you ONLY get what you pay for.

I've purchased two new homes, and it wasn't to tell my friends - I don't even know what you mean by that. I've always purchased new homes because I know someone hasn't smoked in it every day for countless years or wasn't clean or something else like that.

I do appreciate your additional advice, though, and I'm glad you reminded me of Margaritaville in Daytona Beach. I never looked there because I'm not a fan of Daytona, but maybe I should now because I love Jimmy Buffett, and I'm a huge music lover in general.

[Thundarr457]

When we were looking 7 years ago, we had specific things we wanted:

1. one floor, no stairs
2. water view
3. manned gated and patrolled
4. quiet
5. deed restricted (no cars/boats on the front lawn)
6. Proximity to the beach

Whether it was CB or stick didn't enter into the equation, if we insisted on a CB we would still be looking. We looked at over 100 houses from Jax to Naples and everywhere in between that was on the coast. Why live in Florida if you can't be near the ocean

[ShakenStirred]

Originally Posted by socalbee

People like new homes, so they can tell their friends, BUT we have been looking to downsize for about 4 years now. ALL and I mean all the homes we looked at had what I considered poor or shoddy construction in one or more areas. Oh, I am an Engineer, so I am a little picky. No homes except one development that we looked at had homes we would consider buying. This was Margaritaville in Daytona Beach, but it had one other detrimental feature that was intolerable for us, the constant piping of Buffett music.

We think we will stick to homes that were built by reputable builders after 2002 and before 2019. They appear to be the best constructed, at least in our area. When buying a home, you should get a proper structural survey done, NOT the crappy cookie cutter survey recommended by all realtors. Yes, it cost more, but then quality always does.

The only way to go nowadays to get quality construction is with a reputable custom builder where you can set the standards (and pay for them), and have an independent inspector review the process with your standards in mind. Like EVERYTHING, you ONLY get what you pay for.

I agree with everything you just said. One caveat though, is that between 2002 - 2019, the quality of any given builder could vary greatly from year to year, and from neighborhood to neighborhood. As the labor shortage grew worse and worse until today, sometimes builders had to settle for less than quality subs in order to keep up with demand across all their neighborhoods. A lot of subs have gone out of business due to the sheer number of construction defect lawsuits which has put the builders in a tight spot and having to use whomever they could find to simply show up to the jobs.

Sometimes they'd have to change subs several times on one community, which hurts the consistency of the project. I could give lots of examples, but it would take an entire book to put it all out there. Like you said, the only builders I would trust today are mostly custom/semi-custom ones and of course, the ones on my recently published list:

https://www.city-data.com/forum/jacks...-builders.html

[Pincho-toot]

Originally Posted by LFJourney

I appreciate your response. While the Jacksonville area at this point may have had less severe hurricanes than other parts of the state, this is still Florida and history can change. When I moved to the Orlando area decades ago, I thought I wouldn't have to worry about hurricanes, but that wasn't the case at all. In 2004, I had to deal with four hurricanes in a six-week period, and it seems we had more hurricanes during the 28 years that I lived in my house than SW or south Florida did. There's also the threat of termites, which is also a major reason to have concrete block homes in Florida, and home insurance is less expensive. Block homes should be mandated in the entire state...period!

For what its worth, I grew up in Miami inside a concrete home with stucco exterior... and we had to fumigate for termites back in 2013. There's still wood in the home even if its not as predominant.