Delays, Delays, and even more delays at RWD Fern, Medavakkam

Think about this: Dec 2008, RWD claim that Fern will be completed by Nov 2009. 10 months later, they revise the schedule and say that the project will be completed by May 2010. And then in June 2010, they say it will be done in Feb 2011. So is that over now? No. Only 95% is over, and no idea of how long that 5% will take. Check the RWD post forwarded by one of the readers to me:

Lets hope that RWD will take another 6 months time to complete this 5%

Housing Scam may hit Properties Under-construction quite badly ...

From Common Floor blog:

"Stung by Housing Loan Scam, banks and housing finance companies will seek additional security and add completion guarantee clauses into agreements before sanctioning loans to developers."

Wish this would have happened long back. Then RWD would have to give the completion guarantee to the Banks, else it won't get approval for the loans. And if they fail to deliver on time, then banks will never give any loans to them again. Good thing is the new customers of RWD will definitely benefit if the banks push for the guarantee clauses in their agreements.

High court: Developers cannot construct new buildings that are not part of original plan

In a landmark judgement, Bombay High Court has ruled out the options for the developers to construct any new buildings that are not part of the original plan given out to the buyers. The developer can proceed with construction, only after getting the nod from the existing buyers.

This is an wonderful judgement for the residents of the society. This should stop the ugly tricks of the developers, who first promise that there will be only limited number of households in a complex; sell them; and later increase households with new constructions. Click here for the more details.

For the record, RWD did the same for the RWD Palm. RWD initially promised that there will be only ~180 individual houses and all the amenities will be shared by the residents of those houses only. But then later, RWD started Fern and Spring inside the gated area. This not only increased the population of the community, but it came with other issues like the transformer issues, sewage water treatement etc. Probably the owners of the RWD Palm should go ahead and file a case against RWD for the flats and seek proper compensation.

RWD refusing to get the Completion Certificates

In the CommonFloor.com website, from the interesting discussion by the current owners of the RWD apartments, it seems that RWD is not obtaining the Completion Certificate from the Panchayat office. For the background of this, whenever you construct a building (both residential & commercial), you need two important certificates from the Goverment authorities. The first one is the Layout & Plan approval. This means that you propose a design for the building and the Govt. approves the design. Once the construction is over, you need to get the Completion Certificate (sometimes called as Occupational Certificate) This certificate means that the construction was done without any violation and goes as per the approved plan.

RWD has so far refused to obtain the Completion Certificates for the villas as well as apartments. I wouldn't think that there would be major violation in the approved plan (like constructing five floors while only four floors were approved), but this could be because of the quality of the construction. Earlier, we have seen that RWD is heavily reduced the size of the walls and pillars from 2 inches to 1.2 inches. If that is true, by reducing the size of the walls and pillars, they benefit as the cost of the construction is substantially reduced. The problem lies in the fact that the strength of the building is also reduced.

There is also a discussion going on about forming the official owners association. Once that is done, probably getting the certificates should be easier.