Deciding to buy your new home or next condominium; sounds like a fantastic idea. Truly taking your hard earned money, and creating a sense of worth is a great investment. However deciding to buy new constructions or a newly gut re-habbed building is a bad idea.
Reason being is new construction is built with only one thing in mind; save money at all cost. Most developers can create such a building that may look beautiful, and the units on the inside may look amazing as well. One little thing you need to know, everything was built using the cheapest workers, cheapest products and materials. So that beautiful unit, over time will break, crack and show it’s wear and tear usually rather quickly. Every piece of material that went into your unit is the cheapest on the market. Generally you pay for what you get.
This brings me to the next point, the building as a whole. Chances are the developer took many short cuts to save cost re-habbing the building. All the while creating a perception everything is new, so a building inspector or individual unit inspector will see nothing wrong. How often does an inspector for a unit on the ground floor, really examine the roof and parapet walls? Not very often; in my experience most new condominium owners’ don’t understand if the roof leaks into a top floor unit. It will be all the unit owners’ expense to fix the leak in that top floor unit. Many times this is referred to as a Special Assessment or if the Board is managed well, money will be set aside for this type of expense.
In a recent building in which I lived in, the parapet walls looked nice on the outside. Due to a large amount of leaks, we investigated the problem and we found that the parapet walls were never re-constructed. The parapet walls were only tuck-pointed on the outside of the walls to look good, but the inside of the walls were filled with broken bricks, and construction debris. This potentially could have saved the developer thousands of dollars if he did not get caught.
There are many short cuts, like the parapet walls all over the building. The developer will also tell a fully competent contractor to not install things right, but install things only in a manor to get the job done, but not correctly. This ultimately saves the developer money, and if you the buyer don’t catch this short cut, then he saved money where he should not have.
There are so many places a developer can take short cuts. It’s up to you the buyer to catch them. Many home buyers are naive in thinking their new construction home, is great. You are so wrong. The bottom line is the developer is only in it to save and make money. Many of them are rotten people who will tell you what ever you need to hear.
Bottom line I wrote this article not telling you my exact location, but I bought a Condominium in Chicago Illinois from Paul Dukach, or BPL Construction, or Leaduk, Inc. Please whatever you do, do not purchase a condominium from the Dukach’s or have them do any work for you. You will only regret this mistake; chances are it will be a costly one!
If I can stop just one person from falling prey to any of the Dukach’s or BPL Construction, it would be worth it. I would rather live in a box than hand money over to anyone associated with BPL Construction!
