Real Estate /
Angel city Development in Krakow [33]
The date of completion in our contract was stated as 31st December 08 but when we originally signed up in June 06 we were told that completion would be around December 07 and our payment schedule was geared to finish in December 07, since when they have had a very large sum of our money. It has take three months of phoning, badgering and solicitors letters from the official date of our withdrawal to get some of our money back.
Whilst I appreciate that developments nearly always end up finishing late, 18 months late is ridiculous and not acceptable to us. We wanted an apartment to use regularly and not primarily as a long-term investment and we were naiive enough to consider the off-plan option, which looked a reasonable one at the time, given the original timescale.
We also paid the developer a substantial additional amount for structural alterations within the apartment which they agreed to be completed whilst building the development and they happily took our money and issued an official annex to the agreement, signed dated etc. They failed to carry out the work even though we went there especially to sort things out and received promises, signatures etc that everything would be done but it wasn't.
The main reason we finally decided to withdraw (after 31st December 08 when it became clear that building B had some way to go) was when we received the final payment notice which showed that our apartment was almost 3% smaller (nearly 2 sq mtrs) than originally signed for - why? Whilst this was covered in the agreement as being acceptable and they had knocked the difference between 2% and 3% off our final bill, it actually changed our apartment from being a two very small double-bedroomed apartment into a two single-bedroomed apartment, which we would definitely not have considered at the outset. When we asked to change apartments to a larger apartment and to pay the difference (even based on the significantly increased current cost per sq mtr) they told us that was not possible and that they would refund what we had paid and charge us the whole current cost of the larger apartment! A ridiculous additional amount of money to pay for an additional 8 or so sq mtrs!
As to what we do next we have yet to decide but we soon realised that fruitless dialogue and ongoing excuses were just delaying tactics by them and we decided to pull out and retrieve what we could now and think about the rest later. We have not signed any disclaimers and are therefore considering our options.
The whole experience has been problematic, frustrating and expensive and I would be interested to hear about other similar experiences.
