COBB COUNTY, Ga. — A Cobb County woman was charged over $90,000 for a new roof.
82 year old Marie Kleber told channel 2 consumer investigator Justin Gray the loan for the roof will likely outlive her.
“By the time it was paid off by my grandchildren, oh, it would be almost $200,000,” Kleber said.
Kleber stated that the trouble began when a salesman from Erie Home wouldn’t take no for an answer.
“He says it’ll be about $98,000. I said, ‘Oh my God, I can’t pay for it,’” Kleber said.
“He said, ‘Well, can you make a down payment?’ I said, ‘Well, I just got my Social Security check. I could pay $1,600.’ And he says, ‘Well, take that,’” Kleber said.
When Kleber began noticing issues with the roof, she pressed Erie roofing to provide her with the contract. It was only then that she found out the interest rate was nearly 10%.
“If you’d seen this, you would have never signed your name to it,” Gray asked Kleber.
“No, I would not have. I really would not have. Not knowing that it was going to be a 10% mortgage,” Kleber said.
Channel 2 reached out to Stephen McGrew of Academy Roofing for more insight into the contract.
McGrew ran Kebler’s roof through a roof measurement software.
“There’s no way that an asphalt shingle roof should have been 90-something thousand dollars for this house. Not in this Atlanta market, not really in any market here in the United States,” McGrew said.
Looking at the overall roof and running it through our own software, and looking at kind of what the market would be for a roof like that, it was about three times as much as what it should have been,” he said.
Channel 2 reached out to Erie Home and they resonded in a statement:
“At Erie Home, we pride ourselves on delivering the highest-quality service to all customers. We operate under a consistent pricing structure, which is based on the size, condition, materials required, and complexity of the job, and reflects the value of the services, quality, and warranty we provide.”
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