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What to do if our client has given an incorrect street number?

Texas

What do we do if our client has given an incorrect street number on the address (Ex. 3401 vs. 3801) and we’ve been sending lien notices to the address our client stated and signed off on rather than the true address they are doing construction. (The landowner that we have been sending notices to has called us about our own client and believes they are doing this fraudulently.)

5 replies

Jun 11, 2021

Your situation is exactly why you should retain a construction attorney to evaluate your legal situation and to provide advice.  

Incidentally, you should be collecting sufficient information from your customers so that you can verify the identity of the owner and the legal description for the property.

Good luck.

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Jun 11, 2021

 We are a staffing company who provides general labor employees to roughly 2,000 – 3,500 construction sites in Texas every year. Some of these sites may include a single employee for a single day as it’s a temporary and “as needed” basis. For this situation we have signed timesheets from our client with the supposedly incorrect address, does this hold our client liable?

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Jun 12, 2021

Your customer (the company that retained your personnel services) is liable for payment. If proper notice was not issued to the project owner and/or original contractor, then you may not have a legitimate claim for those employees on those days.

You should consider retaining a construction attorney to evaluate your business practices, and to provide advice.

Good luck.

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Jul 28, 2021

Brian is correct that the company that hired you is liable for payment for the services you provided, and, if proper notice was not provided to the project owner and/or original contractor, as required by statute it can impact the ability to claim a vaid lien against the property to secure that debt.

Additionally, it is, of course, best practice to make sure that sufficient information is obtained regarding the projects such that proper notice can be provided.

However, there are a couple things that could potentially help out in situations like the one described above.

First, Texas allows for delivery of a notice personally regardless of how the statute says to deliver the notice (registered or certified mail), and allows notice to be sufficient if the party to receive the notoice actually receives it, no matter how it was given. Accordingly, it may be worth looking into a practice of providing a notice to the employee or some other party to deliver when they are at the jobsite.

Second, Texas law states that: "A copy of the statement or billing in the usual and customary form is sufficient as notice under this section" for the purposes of compliance with the monthly notice requirements - provided that such statements are sent and delivered timely and to the proper parties.

The take-away, though, is that proper and sufficient information is required to make sure that notice requirements can be complied with such that lien protection can be retained when needed to secure payment.

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Aug 4, 2021

If labor or material was provided to a construction project, and the party supplying that labor or material remains unpaid, a mechanics lien may generally be filed to secure the amount due provided the requirements for retaining and perfecting that lien are met. So, if a preliminary notice is required and was provided, and the timing requirements of the lien filing are met, a lien may be filed against the improved property. 

For the situation described here, the same analysis above is required. The issue with filing a lien in a situation like this will be whether any required preliminary / monthly notices were provided and/or sufficient - not with anything having to do specifically with "finding out" the actual address of the property compared to the incorrect address provided.  

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