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Speaking purely from a scientific point of view SOMETHING has to be causing this. The spiders are predators and are eating something. Predators doing just explode in numbers without a viable food source. Do you have anything else living in the walls?
The fact that the previous owners disclosed means you have as close to a slam dunk case as possible. The people that sold to you clearly had knowledge. You need a really good real estate attorney, and yes MLS's go back far so it isn't hard to find out who the buyer and listing agent were on the last transaction. Remember the buyer agent would have passed along those disclosures to her client. He/she will have knowledge to substantiate the omission as well. You should be able to get statements from the listing agent, buyer agent, and those other home owners. That is about as solid as proof gets.
The mystery of the house serindipitously keeps getting revealed to us. In the summer of 2013 a concrete contractor that came to clean our basement slab commented that he had looked at our house to buy in roughly 1998 but he said that the house had a rotting cedar roof on lath that was going to be too much for him to want to replace so he passed on the house. The next owners, the ones that were dealing with the recluse issues had replaced that roof in a workman like manner with plywood base and asphalt shingles. As it works out, ready consumers of rotting cedar are silverfish, the favorite food of brown recluse spiders. We have found no evidence of silverfish at all. My understanding is BRs will cannibalize their own population and other spiders. We had almost no other spiders in our house. They also eat dead bugs. No they are eating themselves. I found evidence for this in a glass bowl where a female had gotten trapped. There was an egg case and a bunch of tiny desiccated and eaten babies and the dead female. So gross.
The previous owners did not disclose this spider problem, thus you have a slam dunk case against them. Contact a real estate lawyer ASAP. It is also important you document every single thing the previous owner said to your husband. Write it down for possible litigation reasons. Then look for any other information that you can find and of course, you have the seller disclosure in hand. Just do it quickly because you may be on a deadline. However, if I remember correctly, statute of limitations often applies when the injured party DISCOVERS they have been wronged, and not when the damage has actually occurred, and those times can of course, be different.
I called an attorney that took the consult over the phone. He essentially gave me the spiel that these cases are high hours, low recovery and many law firms don't take defective home cases now. He said that even having them "dead to rights" on the disclosure is no guarantee of recovery so he declined to take the case. I'm still waiting a return call from another firm that I contacted yesterday. Our problem will be that this is a small city, the previous owner is a prominent person and we are outsider retirees from Alaska. We might have trouble finding someone to help us. I'll keep you all posted.
Your attorney may be right. See this article. The buyers won a judgment, but have not collected and are now suing their own insurance company after the sellers' insurance company weaseled out of the coverage.
I called an attorney that took the consult over the phone. He essentially gave me the spiel that these cases are high hours, low recovery and many law firms don't take defective home cases now. He said that even having them "dead to rights" on the disclosure is no guarantee of recovery so he declined to take the case. I'm still waiting a return call from another firm that I contacted yesterday. Our problem will be that this is a small city, the previous owner is a prominent person and we are outsider retirees from Alaska. We might have trouble finding someone to help us. I'll keep you all posted.
Then take it to the media! Let everyone in town know what this prominent SOB has done.
Yes, media. If not local, next big town/city. If this former owner is prominent in a particular endeavor...and since we know he's a liar with no conscience and creates dreadful problems....he's got to have people in opposition to him. They may be of help, espcially once the bandwagon gets started.
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