You don't always have to live on the same street to be neighbours, or even have a house at all, but you do need something in common.
For one small community of hopeful home-owners, that something is the lack of a house and their frustrations with Dean Lister, director of building company Eleven Ltd.
Ashita Nepak is not pulling her punches when Fair Go visits the site of her stalled build near Dairy Flat in Auckland.
"Dean hasn't even bothered calling us even to apologise that 'sorry, I left you in that situation'. I think not only a shitty builder but he's just a bad human being, to leave us in such a mess where we have no way out, where we don't know what the future looks like for us, we don't know what tomorrow's going to show us."
Together with husband Joydeep Nandi, she bought land and then paid Eleven Ltd $200,000 for a deposit, earthworks, more earthworks and a foundation.
"It's been like this for more than a year now," Nandi says, staring at the gravel, boxing and insulation pinned to the ground, waiting for concrete that it seems was never even ordered.
After constant delays, a couple nearing retirement cancelled their contract with Lister and Eleven Ltd to build their retirement retreat in the bush at Beach Haven. They seldom visit their bush block now.
"It just resurrects all the bad feelings about it. Nothing ever happened and we've been let down by someone who promised us so much and did so little," says a wistful Wayne Gates.
He and wife Eleanor paid an $89,000 deposit. All they have to show for it on the site is a gravelled path for site access and a few trees felled. Demands for a partial refund or even an accounting of where the money has been spent have gone unanswered.
"It's a little bit hard to deal with to be quite honest," Gates says.
The couples don't live next door to each other but their common problems connected them with a neighbourhood online, a digital street; a WhatsApp group of former and current clients of Eleven Ltd.
"What we have been hearing from the other customers is none of the houses are getting built, everyone is losing the deposits and I think we have lost the most," Nandi says.
Dean Lister is apologetic but explains the business is bust.
"I've got into financial issues and had to cease all trading. The company is going into liquidation," he tells Fair Go.
"There's no more companies for me. I'm done. This has broken me. I'm broken."
Lister says he cannot afford to appoint liquidators and is awaiting a creditor to engage one.
He blames the situation on rapidly rising costs and extra overheads imposed over the previous three years by Covid-19 measures, set against the fixed-price contracts Eleven Ltd had taken on.
He says he takes responsibility, but can't make up the losses and claims to have no assets of his own and no funds placed elsewhere in trust from the business.
"I'm deeply, deeply sorry for it and I wish it would be different.
"Ultimately being the director of the company, I'm 100% at fault. The company has ceased trading and pending liquidation and that's it."
Fair Go has been supplied audio of a conversation recorded by one former customer in April 2022. Lister is explaining his predicament then to the customer:
"I can't afford at the moment to pay people upfront to get them on site. That's my biggest issue, so basically what I'm having to do is get funds from other jobs and then slide money sideways to get your one up and running and that's proving to be difficult," is Lister's frank self-assessment.
Two weeks later in May 2022, he was pressuring Joydeep Nandi to pay $70,000 upfront for the foundation stage of that project, even though the contract expressly states payment is only on practical completion of a stage.
Nandi says Lister told him the concrete contractors needed a deposit to secure a booking. "As a customer you don't know how it works, you say OK."
Fair Go asked if those funds had been reallocated to another job, especially since the works never took place.
"Joydeep's money went into Joydeep's job," Lister insists. He claims there were delays due to weather, water on the site, and a revised engineering solution involving foundation perimeter piles.
The revision followed a failed geotechnical report, after an engineer found the earthworks Lister had done were only half as deep as they needed to be.
Proposed solutions — adding piles or scraping and starting again — would cost many tens of thousands of dollars extra.
Master Builders chief executive David Kelly warns against pre-paying stages.
"Be very careful and be wary about paying too much up front. Those schedule of payments they're there for a reason and they're there to protect the consumer," Kelly tells Fair Go.
"If the builder's asking for more, get independent advice from your lawyer. Is this sensible and ask why it's necessary."
Kelly says that advice is also crucial before signing a contract, as is a realistic cost assessment.
"If the contract price seems to be too good, it may be."
Kelly offers the same advice to builders facing difficulty, that they need to look carefully at their cost structure if they want to be able to keep trading.
For disputes arising between customers and members, he encourages them to enter into a mediation process Master Builders will pay for and says this has resolved more than 90% of the cases it accepts.
That process is no longer an option for Dean Lister's clients. Kelly says the association suspended Eleven Ltd's membership more than a year ago.
It will honour any Master Build guarantees in place.
The Gates had not opted for a guarantee, but Joydeep Nandi and Ashita Nepak had cover on loss of deposit up to $50,000, or up to 20% of the contract cost, up to $171,000 in the event of non-completion.
"The builder hasn't completed. They simply haven't done the work and that's obvious," Kelly says following an inspection report on the site that also noted deficiencies in the work.
"We've paid out the maximum amount under the guarantee," Kelly says, "but it's a sad situation, very difficult for them, a very unfortunate situation where it appears the builder has got into commercial difficulty and they have made some mistakes in terms of the build."
Joydeep Nandi and Ashita Nepak say it's very emotional seeing the funds land in their account.
The settlement won't be enough to complete the dream home they planned as that is now far more costly to build, but it will provide enough to start over as hopeful home-owners.
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