West Kelowna condo buyers want developer to honour original sales contracts

When Eric Froese and his wife put a deposit down on a unit at West Kelowna’s Gellatly Place development in August 2016, they said they were told they would be moving into their new home a couple months later.

That promise prompted them to sell their house.

But the move-in date at Gellatly Place just kept getting postponed and nearly two years later, they still haven’t moved into their new condo unit.

“We’ve been imposing upon friends, family, everybody that we can,” Eric Froese said.

Froese isn’t the only one in this predicament.

Jim Mahannah and his wife also put down a deposit on a unit and they, along with everyone else, are still waiting to move in.

“We were promised a unit when we signed the contract in June of 2017 to be in by August 1st [2017],” Mahannah said. “That prompted us to really hustle to sell our home and we did with the expectation we were moving in August 1st.”

The 33-unit project next to the Cove Lakeside Resort in West Kelowna has been plagued with numerous setbacks and delays, one of them involving a stop work order imposed by the City of West Kelowna to address what it called building code deficiencies.

While the building is nearly complete, the City of West Kelowna won’t issue an occupancy permit until those deficiencies are dealt with.

While remedial work is now underway at the building, the delays have led to another problem. Sales contracts expired this past March and the developer, Stewart Smith, isn’t willing to extend them.

“We are the customers, we have done nothing wrong,” Mahannah said. “We are abiding by our end of it, we just want the builder to abide by his end of it.”

Deposits have been returned to about half the buyers, the other half refusing to walk away wanting the developer to honour the original sales contract.

“We want our unit upon the agreed price in our original contract,” Froese told Global News. “That is what it is all about to us.”

Global News contacted the developer, Stewart Smith, who declined an on-camera interview saying it was too short of a notice.

When Global asked why the contracts can’t be honoured or extended, Smith would only say the contracts are now null and void and are not extendable.

While they don’t know for certain, buyers suspect higher real estate values may be behind the developer not willing to honour the original contracts.

“If you have 33 units and you stand to make another, make it a nice round figure, another $100,000 a unit, that makes you $3.3 million more. So $3.3 million is a lot of money, I get it, to everybody but an agreement is an agreement,” Froese said.

The situation has left many of the people who put down deposits with financial burden.

Now I am probably out of pocket maybe 100 grand trying to buy into a different place now with all the prices rising,” Mahannah said. “It is a serious issue for us.”

The situation prompted Froese to send this message to the developer:

“Be the responsible developer that we all thought you were when we all signed on and gave you our money in good faith at the beginning of it all and honour our contract.”

The buyers are now considering their next move including seeking legal opinion on how to move forward.