They Are POS houses and the cheapest one is $330,000

That wall isn't going to support that fence. That's terrible.

That’s a snake habitat!

am leaning this way as well..that's a big flat surface that's elevated for the wind to hit

hope I'm wrong

Did white boys build that?

My buddy’s son worked as a GC for dr Horton. His bonus incentives hinged on completing each house within 50 days. He quit that job because he could not stomach the shortcuts required to hit the mark.

Specifically, I'm interested to hear why you think the houses are POSs? What about their construction is below the standards of a modern $300k home?

Caulk and Paint make it what it Ain't

In my area they seem to get a lot of complaints.

All builders use caulk and paint to cover poor finish quality. My last house was a half million dollar custom home and they did that everywhere. You think they aren't doing the same thing on the expensive houses, you got another thing coming. Brother contracted to have a custom home built last year and builder cut corners you wouldn't believe, even to the point of breaching his contract explicitly because abiding by it was too expensive. When we approached him, he said, "go get a lawyer, your house will be done in 5 years after litigation is complete and you win a $50k judgement against me that you'll never collect on." Lawyer said he was right. This was a high end house that will sell for around $1M on the 4 acres of land it has.

After renovating multiple older homes, I can tell you DR Horton quality is much, much, much better than they built carp in the 70s and 80s. That stuff was so poorly done, some of the things I've seen are comical. I've looked through many of the local DR Horton homes and the quality is quite good IMHO for the price point.

Not they're not perfect. They're also not priced that way. Most of the stuff that is priced for higher quality isn't actually built any better.

Scrap lumber, don't dry their houses out to at least 10% on a moisture reader, cover up wet insulation with drywall,inadequate heat during drywall,don't plane walls and barely crown their studs. I've wired a lot of DRH homes and have done retro work in them once complete. I have worked in their developments and seen all this. No different then Rob Rice homes here locally which I bought one because at the time it worked for us and our growing family. Good luck and 500k is like base model homes nowadays. So yes Caulk and paint make it what it aint. High end custom homes definitely shy away from hiding as usually you have the best trade workers on the house.

24" stud spacing on all interior walls. Single top plates on interior walls. Wall sections are pre-fabricated off-site, so they just stand them up and go, actual stab dimensions be darned. Not sure I've ever seen one where the garage wall framing sits properly on the stem walls...most seem to overhang the stem wall on the interior side by more than 1/3 the width of the sole plate. I could go on. They are what they are...a base model 1/2 ton silverado with a 4 cylinder, standard trans, vinyl bench seat, rubber floor mats and hand crank windows. Most are starter homes which is a needed sector in the housing market. They do have some higher end product (mid-range housing) but that is not their bread and butter. Financing is what they are really selling. Their profit margins on that significantly outpace those from construction...or did anyway, I should say. They can blow out a subdivision faster than any other volume builder I have seen. They have their system down.

My comments are based only on the product they have produced in my jurisdiction over the last 20 years...they haven't been an active builder here in over 5 years though, so some things may have changed but I doubt it. With all that said, I would take a Horton home over a KB home everyday and twice on Sunday! LOL

depending on the anchor bolts
it could be ok

somebody put effort into fabricating a mortar mound
that will keep the water flowing off the anchors
but that will not hold the post up

Did Butch and Hop team up on that build?

I had been through multiple full custom builds, and all of them did as bad or worse as everything you said.

Most of that isn't that big of a deal. And certainly none of that is any different than what most custom home builders are doing. Same build quality, nicer finishes in my experience. All are significantly better than fox & jacobs used to be. Wondering if your experience is from a while back? My experiences with DR Horton are mostly recent (last 3-4 years). DR Horton is never gonna tell you that they're going to knowingly break a contract and dare you to sue them because they know it will impact you way more than them (my previous custom builder did this to many customers).

I don't think DR Horton even uses foam insulation, so I'm not sure what you're saying with that one.

Recently anyways, they really build a nice house. But yeah if you're expecting perfection, your budget needs a zero behind it.