A Penticton construction company is set to end 2024 the way it started, with a lawsuit over unpaid bills.
Southside Builder's Mart in Oliver is suing Jason Stutzke, doing business as Okanagan Extreme Homebuilders.
This will be the 12th time Stutzke and his company were sued since January 2024 as the Oliver company filed on Dec. 12 for $35,000 in unpaid business materials and interest stretching back to May, 2023.
This is on top of the over $7 million in previous lawsuits for unpaid materials and work and foreclosure filings on mortgages on Stutzke's home.
The home at 148 Garnet Way had been listed for sale earlier in 2024 for $17 million, but the listing has since disappeared.
An AirBnB listing for a guest house labelled Garnet Way Extreme Dream hosted by a Jody and Jason, remains online though no dates are available to be booked.
The company's website has also been made inaccessible, and its entry on the Canadian Home Builder's Association website has also been deleted.
Although it has been deleted, extremehomebuilders.com is available on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine and lists Jason Stutzke as the company's founder and his history as a home builder since 1993 in Manitoba.
According to online court records, Stutzke and the company he was affiliated with there, Diamond J Homes (alternatively Diamond "J" Homes or Diamond J Construction) was also subject to multiple lawsuits between 2009 and 2014.
One of the previous lawsuits filed in 2024 against Stutzke in Penticton alleged that he had taken money for constructing new homes to pay for building his own house on Garnet Way.
Several of the lawsuits went unanswered, with some receiving applications for default judgements due to a lack of a response.
In his response to the mortgage foreclosures, Stutzke claimed that the market value of the Garney Way property exceeded the mortgage and that the mortgage was thus adequately secured, and that he was in the process of refinancing to cover his debts.
The most recent lawsuit does not give a local mailing address for Stutzke. It lists his company's office location, and for a mailing address, it lists a property near Malakwa that, according to BC Assessments, has nothing on it except for a shed and outbuilding.
Malakwa is near Sicamous, where Stutzke had previously run a business called Extreme Power Sports, up until it was abruptly destroyed in a fire on May 6, 2015.
No response has yet been filed to the most recent lawsuit and none of the claims have been tested in court.