A technical specification is the contractor's written commitment on what will be in the apartment the resident is buying. In 95 percent of cases or more, developers meet everything they promised in it, but where there are deviations, someone has to pay, or more precisely, money has to be returned to the resident.
When an apartment's price is set against a given technical specification and the developer falls short of it or deviates from it, the resident is entitled to financial compensation under the law of monetary claims.
When does this kind of non-conformity happen? One common case is when residents make their own changes, for example to electrical points, and the developer gets confused and deviates from the specification as a result. Either way, what is written in the specification governs: however confusing the situation gets, the specification is what you are entitled to, and what you paid for.
Non-conformity on the developer's side is less common, but it happens. Below is a case that combined construction defects with exactly this kind of non-conformity. In the end, every apartment that sued won about ₪80,000 in compensation from the developer. For now, the focus is on the non-conformities rather than the defects that were found.
Non-conformity with the technical specification: the "Amana" case
In this case, we issued expert opinions for a large number of semi-detached houses in a settlement built by the developer Amana. Amana did fix the defects in most of the houses based on our opinion, so most residents did not sue, though a few did.
Besides a series of construction defects, this case also involved non-conformity with the technical specification the developer had promised, the less common half of the story. It showed up in several elements, mainly the fence around the houses, which was built as a steel railing instead of the promised concrete wall with stone cladding, and in the unmet commitment to "air-conditioning preparation," which in practice was never done.
The Sale (Apartments) Law is clear that a technical specification, which is part of the contract, cannot be departed from: once a developer has sold a resident something specific, he cannot change it, even with reasonable-sounding justifications, which is exactly what happened here.
The fence around the buildings was supposed to be clad in stone, inside and out, per the specification. In practice, the contractor built stone cladding only on the lower part of the fence and installed a plain steel railing above it, skipping the concrete wall and stone cladding that would have cost far more than the railing.
That might sound like we are being unfair to the developer, but from his side it meant a saving of ₪30,000 per house across 33 houses, money the residents had paid for that fence and that stayed in the developer's pocket instead of buying them what they were promised.
To be fair, the fence looked good, and the developer pointed out, correctly, that the open railing gave a better view. But the residents had still paid for a more expensive fence than the one they got.
It should also be said, in the developer's favor, that he did make the effort to fix every construction defect found in the apartments; he simply did not want to refund money.
In a home inspection lawsuit, Arad includes every defect and deviation in the claim. Here, the defects and the specification deviations added up to about ₪100,000 per apartment, and the resident was ultimately awarded roughly ₪90,000 (Tel Aviv Magistrates' Court, case 8861-02-13).
Beyond the fence, another non-conformity was the unmet commitment to prepare the apartments for air conditioning. The contractor tried to fix this after the fact by running exposed bundles of electrical and gas wiring along the outside wall, instead of embedding them in the walls during construction as promised, which of course hurt the look of the houses.
Arad's claim included the cost of chiseling into the walls and embedding the wiring properly. Even though that work was never actually carried out, the resident was compensated as though it had been, since a resident is not obligated to settle for improvised fixes just because the developer failed to meet the specification.
It is worth repeating: a resident who has paid this much money has real power under the law, and one who does not use it to demand what the Sale Law entitles him to is simply giving up money he already paid. A home inspection is not only inexpensive, and its cost is refunded when no construction defects are found, but it also protects the resident's rights and helps him get full value for his money.
The engineers of Arad Bedek Bayit, led by building engineer Ron Arad, whom courts appoint as their own expert on construction defects. The company has been inspecting apartments and buildings since 2001. Engineer Ron Arad · More about the company