Real estate

SPRING HILL, Fla. — Neil Rasmussen said so many of his neighbors in the Pristine Place subdivision had collected insurance settlements for sinkhole damage, he thought he would give it a try, too.

He and his wife, Pamela Beacham — the homeowner and policyholder of record — filed a claim with state-run Citizens Property Insurance about two years ago. It took only a few weeks for the company to investigate and come back with an offer of $186,000.

"I said, 'Hey, send me the check,' " Rasmussen said.

Beacham paid off a $136,500 mortgage in August 2010, according to county records. The couple did not fix the sinkhole damage, said Rasmussen, 62, a retired truck driver, because other than minor cracking, there wasn't much to fix.

"I actually think I have a very solid house."

The decision to file a sinkhole claim might seem to be a simple case of applied science. But for the residents of Pristine Place, already stressed by a collapsing economy, that decision is often about psychology as much as it is geology.

The sinkholes in this gated community are not headline-making monsters that swallow houses, but subtle "subsidences" that crack walls and pool decks.

Pristine Place's stucco homes, all less than 20 years old, are clean and spacious, the lawns closely cropped. From the street, the damage signs are the crews pumping grout under the foundations of houses.

But according to the Hernando County Property Appraiser's Office, nearly one-third of the 673 homes in Pristine Place have documented sinkhole damage — the highest concentration in Hernando, which has the highest concentration of sinkhole-damaged homes in the state.

Talking to homeowners and examining public records starts to explain the biggest puzzle about sinkhole claims: why their numbers have exploded in the last half-dozen years.

Certainly nothing has changed about the underground formation of the state, said Jonathan Arthur, director of the Florida Geological Survey.

Frequent drought followed by heavy rain increases sinkhole activity, and cracking can be caused by loose fill dirt or other shoddy building practices, he said.

"Probably most important, there has been a change in perception by the population. People notice it more and are more aware of it, which is obviously not a geological aspect," he said. "I think it would be a marvelous dissertation topic for a sociology student."

Like most people in Hernando, Pristine Place residents are made aware of sinkholes through billboards and cable-television ads.

The subdivision is also the target of solicitation letters and full-page spreads in its community newsletter, including a recent one from Fort Lauderdale-based Five Star Claims Adjusting that boasted the company had been "successful in recovering large checks for several of your neighbors."

Paul Holmes, 69, who has reported sinkhole damage, said a friend in Pristine Place "had a 2-inch crack in his house and that starts you thinking."

The tiles in his kitchen buckled, the pool deck cracked, and "sometimes when I was lying awake, I'd hear popping sounds," he said. "I started to realize, this isn't normal."

The engineering company that inspected the property, Geohazards of Gainesville, found underground voids, but stopped short of stating definitively that sinkholes rather than settling had caused the damage.

That uncertainty is typical and makes it hard to go after, for example, builders who bring in bad fill, said Ron Weaver, a land-use lawyer from Tampa. Insurance companies are an easier target for homeowners who see cracks because a policy is an "explicit, paid-for right to compensation," he said.

If claims work for homeowners who fix sinkhole damage, they can work even better for those who don't.

Residents who collect the maximum allowed by their policies can continue to live in their houses or resell them. Also, the Hernando property appraiser offers an unintentional tax incentive not to fix sinkholes, cutting the assessed value of repaired homes by 10 percent compared with 50 percent for unrepaired ones.

Cindie Chiparo, 60, said the $200,000 settlement she and her husband, Frank, received was at least $25,000 short of the amount needed to fill their sinkhole. Instead, they paid off their mortgage and her husband repaired the home's interior cracks.

Chiparo sees nothing wrong with keeping the insurance check. Because the county didn't do enough to ensure Pristine Place was built on solid ground, she said, "I still feel like I was ripped off."

The homeowners point out that pocketing sinkhole claims was legal before the law changed last year. But one of Rasmussen's neighbors, Carl Stopp, said the practice is dishonest because other homeowners ultimately pick up the tab.

Pristine Place, with slightly more than 1 percent of the single-family homes in Hernando, accounted for a loss of $9.9 million in taxable value due to sinkhole damage last year, about 9 percent of the county total.

The lousy housing market that owners of unrepaired homes complained about wouldn't be so lousy if not for the traffic in cut-rate sinkhole homes, said Anthony Kanaris, a property appraiser who lives in Pristine Place.

The buyers of the unrepaired homes are not just investors but people who plan to live in them — which may be the surest sign that opportunism is driving the sinkhole claims.