TOP8 – Let’s fix that sh…t and get our building in shape!

The problem

Because of the insolvency of PROJECT, our building was never fully completed. There are lots of places with uncompleted work, or places where PI built horrible cheap “solutions” when their money was running out (like for example the visible cables in the entrance areas, the wall material in the courtyard hallways, etc etc).

The bad news is: We didn’t receive the building we all thought we would get when we originally signed the contract…

The good news is: We don’t have to live with a faulty, unfinished building!

The solution

We can finish the building according to our own wishes and fix all defects, using the final payments that we don’t have to pay to PROJECT!

Every owner should still have at minimum 3,5% of the purchase price sitting in their account (in sum around 2,3 Million EUR) that were planned for the final payment to PROJECT. Since the insolvent PROJECT will not complete our building, we can redirect these 2,3 Million EUR: instead of paying these funds to PROJECT or the insolvency administrator as final payment we give it to the WEG to fix/complete our building.

Our Teilungserklärung states that if PROJECT is not able or willing to finish construction, each owner MUST PROVIDE THE NECESSARY FUNDS to finish the building as planned and promised (at the advertised “elevated” standard, and free of defects).

• The Teilungserklärung 1.3.4. steckengebliebener Bauabschnitt provides a clear obligation for each owner to provide the funds necessary to get our buillding in shape!
• Each owner has contractually accepted the Teilungserklärung as part of his/her notarized contract with PROJECT
• The obligation to provide funds to the WEG to finish construction and fix defects is fully independent on how much (or how little) each owner has paid to PROJECT. So even those improdent owners who paid PROJECT in full are required to pay their share to ensure that we all get the building we were promised!

The plan

As we have seen, financing the necessary remaining work is not a difficult issue. However, these next steps will require quite a bit of coordination and work:

• compiling a list of all issues/necessary works (and grouping them by craft/type)
• developing design options for the larger problem areas
• finding contractors, requesting quotes

The big advantage is, that while safety-related building have a defined technical solution, lots of other issues have many possible solutions and we now have the freedom to decide ourselves HOW we want to design the unfinished spots in our building – instead of having a PI architect deciding for us.

For example, the courtyard hallways need new walls. We could just contract a builder and will get a sturdy grey wall – we will end up paying a substantial amount of money but the hallway will keep looking like a fugly piece of … OR we could invest some time and collective effort to plan what materials and lighting we want and then hand our customized plans to a builder. By investing time (and maybe 5% more in materials), we can get a MUCH nicer hallway that doesn’t look like a deadend where garbage and old mice go to die…

From this…

to this…

How much will it cost?

Short answer: no one knows.

Long answer: The final cost will depend mainly on two factors:

1. How many building defects we will find. All current defect lists are based only on a visual inspection. Noone knows what additional issues we discover once we start opening walls (case in point: garbage room Lynar 33 – we opened the wall to find the cause for the ventilation issues – and found a massive fire safety issue).
2. How much planning will be done by owners (hiring an external provider to coordinate construction will cost approx. 100.000 EUR according to Mr. Schwarzenstein – and that amount doesn’t include any design/architectural advice). An active owners “Fertigbau” workgroup that takes care of design decisions and coordinating construction will save us substantial amounts.

A third factor is of course, how many defects we want to simply ignore… And the fourth and least relevant factor is: how expensive our design choices are.

IF we handed our complete list of ALL issues (TÜV-Report, owner-submitted defects, Schwarzenstein Report) to an external planning office, we would end up paying quite a bit more than the 1,2 Mio EUR that Schwarzenstein calculated (but that’s just my guess).
If we instead have an active group that operates like the solar plant group (does all of the planning/coordinating/finding construction companies), my guess is that we can fix our buiding and make it 🤩NICE🏰 according to our wishes for maybe around 400-600k.