Check Horton’s quality for yourselves: 2007 & 2006 J D Powers customer satisfaction surveys:

Note that Centex ranks at the top and that D R Horton, the largest builder is only favorably mentioned once in a market where there are only 3 competitors, Centex and two others near bankruptcy.

Colorado Home Alliance, Issue #1, March/April 2005: 2004 JD Powers and Associates New Home Customer Satisfaction Study: D R Horton ranked at the bottom of the list in the Denver/Colorado Springs area, with a score almost 50% below the industry average. D R Horton also ranked at the bottom of Warranty Week’s list of warranty spending in 2003, with only 0.3% of total sales being used to complete the warranty work.

“D.R. Horton keeps costs low while battling rivals” Nov. 30, 2005, By James R. Hagerty and Kemba J. Dunham, The Wall Street Journal: Despite soaring sales, D.R. Horton regularly ranks dismally in customer-satisfaction surveys done by J.D. Power & Amp Associates

To find out just how bad Horton is in quality and warranty, search the following terms in your browser or click the links: ‘j d powers builder survey d r Horton’ or ‘d r Horton consumer satisfaction’

D.R. Horton seems to have a customer relations problem. As the chart below shows, it has an extremely low claims rate. It is by far the revenue leader, with $3.28 billion in new home sales during the second quarter of 2005. In terms of warranty payouts, it's seventh in the industry, with only $21 million in claims recorded so far in 2005. Ordinarily, the chart below would be a good thing, showing claims rates around 0.3% to 0.4% and accrual rates comfortably higher. But then there's the J.D. Power results.

Pick a city. In Orlando, D.R. Horton is fifth from the bottom. In Atlanta and Las Vegas, D.R. Horton is second from the bottom. In Denver and Washington DC, D.R. Horton is the bottom -- the builder with the lowest customer satisfaction ratings of all.

How can this be? How can a company have both a low warranty claims rate and a low customer satisfaction rating? We don't know, but it reminds us of something a computer maker once said: "If I really thought cutting warranty costs to a minimum was a good thing, I'd just stop answering the phones." In fact, that manufacturer said there was a direct correlation between denied claims, lengthy holding times, and other aggressive warranty cost-cutting behaviors and low customer satisfaction levels.

We hate to compare the claims rates of different companies against one another without knowing what each includes in their warranty tallies, but in this case we can't resist. D.R. Horton had an 0.3% claims rate as of June and paid out $21 million in the first six months of this year. Centex had an 0.4% claims rate and paid out $17.7 million. Both rates are below average, and both payouts are in the lower half of the industry top ten. And of course both are close in terms of numbers. Yet Centex was in the money in 20 out of the 30 markets surveyed, and D.R. Horton was consistently at or near the bottom.

It would appear that some of D.R. Horton's customers took their revenge in the form of filling out J.D. Power and Associates surveys. It would appear that there is such a thing as too little warranty. Suffice it to say that D.R. Horton won't be putting out any press releases about the results of this survey.

The top ten home warranty providers are rounded out by M.D.C. Holdings, NVR Inc., Fleetwood Enterprises, and Champion Enterprises. M.D.C. and its subsidiary Richmond American Homes are prominent in Denver and Washington, DC, but it ranked near the bottom in both markets. Its warranty track record, meanwhile, is at or slightly above the industry average except for that noticeable spike in the second quarter of last year.