00:00 Excuse me. Thank you.
00:04 Best friends Pauline and Kobe have been living in this caravan for two years.
00:09 They moved in to save money while their duplex was being built.
00:13 I long for my queen bed. Wouldn't it be lovely?
00:18 After repeated delays, their builder, Stroud Homes Northern Rivers, collapsed in May.
00:24 Their home wasn't finished, so they're waiting on insurance.
00:27 We're living on a friend's farm, a cane farm.
00:30 We are able to actually camp in the backyard basically.
00:34 And before this we've been at a showground, we've done a few house sits.
00:39 Not living in a car thankfully, but yeah.
00:41 Yeah, we are homeless.
00:43 A building inspector recently found dozens of defects,
00:47 including that the house didn't fit on its concrete slab.
00:51 The timber framing is overhanging the slab by 60mm, which completely compromises the structural integrity.
00:59 The gap is so large, the ground can be seen from inside the bedroom.
01:03 The frame is virtually sitting in mid-air with no support to offer the rest of the building at all.
01:10 Their insurance is unlikely to cover everything, but at least they were insured.
01:15 Zoe Croft wasn't.
01:17 This is the flooring we chose, bench tops, some of the tiles.
01:22 She paid a $94,000 deposit to the builder, who didn't take out home warranty insurance as required.
01:29 Zoe says around a dozen others have lost their deposits too.
01:33 I've cried enough tears. Yeah, it's been emotionally quite devastating.
01:40 In a statement, Stroud Homes said it was devastated to learn its former franchisee had left customers uninsured,
01:47 but did not return their deposits as it said the payments had been made directly to the builder.
01:52 NSW Fair Trading is investigating.
01:55 At the exact moment Australia needs to go on a building blitz, customers are having a crisis of confidence.
02:01 And the effect of that is instead of people building new homes, they buy existing homes.
02:07 And that threatens to undermine the national target of 1.2 million new homes by the end of the decade.
02:14 The government wants to build more houses, we're trying to do that. There's nothing that really protects us.
02:19 Protections that are long overdue.
02:21 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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