Five days after the new owners moved into a hillside house in Tarrant County in April 2014, a toilet began to bubble. On weekdays the plumbing ran fine; on weekends, when they showered and ran laundry, the aerobic septic system backed up. It took fourteen months and three septic companies to find out why: the pipe carrying waste out of the house ran uphill to the tank.
A state-certified installer dug to the inlet pipe on June 11, 2015. The line, he said, had “four inches of up[-]grade, going uphill from the home to the tank . . . About half the pipe was under water.” The whole system sat about six inches too shallow; a second company confirmed three weeks later that “the tank was not installed deep enough.”
When the sellers put the house on the market in October 2013, they signed a Seller’s Disclosure Notice stating that they knew of no defect or malfunction in the plumbing or the septic system. Where the form asked for the home’s service providers, they wrote “N/A” next to sewer.
What each side claimed
The buyers sued in September 2015 under the Deceptive Trade Practices Act and for statutory fraud…