CAMARILLO, Calif. — When Mark Moore mows his lawn, he is a sight to behold.
Looking a bit like the rubber-armed Michelin man, he says that in order to get the job done safely, he has to wear a heavily padded leather jacket, filled with 4 inches of goose-down feathers to protect the vertebrae in his back; a wide-brimmed pith helmet to prevent injury to his head and face; a pair of goggles to cover his eyes; long pants with kneepads; and a pair of long, thick landscape gloves.
Moore’s weekly ritual of suiting up in improvised protective gear is necessary, he said, because he has to shield himself from golf balls that land on his property every day.
“It’s snowing golf balls. We get up to 28 a day. They come in at such a high speed that we can’t let our children outside to play, and we can’t let the dog out. It’s awful,” said his wife, Carolyn Masters Moore.
When the couple bought their dream home, they said, they had no idea how quickly it would become a nightmare.
After moving into the house in late July, it took about a week for them to realize they had a major golf-ball hazard to grapple with, they said.
Because their property is adjacent to the Spanish Hills golf course, they expected the occasional stray ball to land in their yard, but it’s the blizzard of bulletlike errant golf balls that makes them feel like prisoners inside their own home, they said.
“We have to wear helmets when we go outside, or carry an umbrella to protect ourselves and our kids. I feel betrayed, hurt and angry,” said Carolyn Moore.
She said their 12-year-old daughter, Aiden, a goalkeeper for a soccer club, can’t practice in the yard with her friends. The Moores lend construction-quality hard hats to their visitors for safety and liability reasons.
After living for several years in a town home they own in Oxnard, they purchased their two-acre, $2.1 million home near the seventh fairway because of the space and security they thought it offered their family.
Mark Moore said they invested everything they had to acquire the house and borrowed from their parents.
He said his mother is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, so his parents planned to move in. But when his mother nearly got hit by a golf ball while eating lunch on the patio, they had to abandon that plan.
“A ball also whizzed by our daughter’s head and missed her by inches,” said Carolyn Moore.
The Moores contend they didn’t know the location of their property was unique, compared with nearby homes, when it came to the quantity and velocity of incoming golf balls.
“There was no disclosure about the special problem associated with this particular property. If we had known about the severity of the golf-ball hazard, we would not have bought the house,” said Mark Moore.
The Moores said they will move back into their town home until the situation is resolved. They said they want the purchase of their home rescinded and their money refunded.
“A house on a golf course is going to have golf balls; they knew that. If there was a special disclosure about that property, I knew absolutely nothing about it at the time of the transaction,” said Laura Means, the real estate agent who represented the sellers and sold the home to the Moores through the Illinois-based relocation company SIRVA.
“We believe the homeowners disclosed everything they should have disclosed and that the buyers were fully aware of the circumstances of the property,” said Jeff Margolis, attorney for SIRVA.
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