Here's a whoopsie for the survey books. A Florida builder constructed a $680,000, ocean-view house on the wrong lot in an exclusive Palm County community. The mistake wasn't detected until six months after construction when a surveyor of a nearby lot discovered the foul-up.
Keystone Homes, the builder based in Ormond Beach, Florida, reportedly is trying to straighten this mess out -- without lawyers.
A whole lot of folks had to drop the ball for a mistake like this to happen -- surveyors, the builder, Flagler County building inspectors, utility installers, even the Missouri lot owners who reportedly visited the construction site several times and didn't notice their five-bedroom vacation home, with home theater, game room and screened-in pool -- was going up in the wrong place. They own No. 23 Ocean Ridge Blvd. North, but the house was built on No. 21.
"We are in total disbelief, just amazed that this could happen," Mark Voss, from central Missouri, told the News-Journal. Voss reportedly owns 18 other lots in the gated Hammock Dunes resort community on Florida's east coast -- unfortunately, just not the one his house was built on.
The ground zero mistake reportedly was made by an Ormond Beach company that completed the first survey in 2013 and placed the stakes on the wrong lot.
Anthony Sanzone, president of East Coast Land Surveying, told AOL that learning of the mistake was one of the worst moments in his life.
"My heart dropped out of my body," Sanzone says. "I went into shivers and cold sweats. We could not believe this could happen."
With any luck, the next-door neighbors will just switch lots, Sanzone says.
But luck is the one thing this real estate debacle has so far lacked.