Unlike the inspection period and the warranty period, terms the legislator created in the Sale Law, "shnat bedek" (the first-year inspection) does not appear in the law at all. Contractors invented it: they prefer to gather every resident's complaints into a single date, the end of the first year in the new apartment, which collapses the inspection and warranty periods (four to seven years combined by law) down to just one, and in practice they push even that year to its final day.
We have heard of residents who reported a defect and were asked, politely, to wait until the end of the first year so the contractor could take all complaints at once. That created the mistaken belief that every complaint had to wait for the shnat bedek to end.
We have also heard of residents told, once they complained, that the shnat bedek was already over and they had missed their chance. Both are a serious deception.
Residents lose on two counts. First, they live with a defect for a full year with no real reason to: nothing requires waiting when a problem could be fixed sooner, and the delay favors the contractor, who may find the resident too tired to keep complaining, or simply used to the defect and ready to forget it. Second, some residents give up a valid claim for a defect that appears after the first year, believing they are already too late.
That is a real loss. The Sale Law exists to protect the resident's rights, and an apartment is a complex product: some defects by nature only surface during ordinary use, including well after the first year.
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