I had a friend whose bathtub drain was attached to nothing at all. It just spilled out into the space below the apartment. When they opened out up, they're was a giant subterranean pond hollowed out by years of water pouring out onto the ground.

Shades of Arrested Development.

Even basics like "does the person/company building something own the land it is built on" can go horribly wrong.

Edit: Here in Scotland if someone builds something on your land then it belongs to you and you are under no obligation to warn them of this fact!

Yah there is that. In the US, it is usually mandated that you get something called "title insurance". There are different levels depending who it protects (lender vs buyer). If down the line it turns out you don't own the land your house is on, the title insurance company does lawsuit magic or somehow pays to make the lender whole.

End up costing ?? $1,000 or so per real estate transaction. 99.9999% of the time pays back zero. I suppose nice to have for the last .0001%.

We had to use ours. What happened is that the title people didn't realise the guy selling us the house had two properties and they paid off the wrong house.

Then the guy sold his (newly paid off) house and disappeared.

The first time we leaned anything was amiss was when we had an eviction notice posted on our door. The title company didn't bother telling us until it got that far.

It caused a whole bunch of problems and the company kept dragging their feet hoping someone else would pay. It took a lawyer and threat of a suit to get them to finally pay out.

Codes don't mean squat if the inspector doesn't or won't catch violations on the closeout.

Not sure the value add of that statement.

Clearly some codes do work, and the average building has less issues because of codes.

The value add is saying that codes are important, but enforcement is just as important. Perhaps moreso because if you skip the latter, the former doesn't mean anything at all.

If the builder skimped on the $20 cleanout, it should have been noticed by the building inspector.

And the building code means the minimum code required not the maximum. A builder can make it better if they want to when they are building a structure.