I have dealt with more than 1 builder and Jains are certainly not trustworthy. Quite contrary to their advertisement their service absoluetely sucks and they simply don’t care. Talk to any owner in Chennai and they will tell stories. Visit any of their recent projects and you can see it first hand. It is very normal for them to delay projects a year and beyond and not offer any compensation. Unscruplous.
To add to it, their quality simply sucks. Builders like this should be debarred from practise. People should start to lodge complaints using our justice system to bring such errant builders to book. Until such time we have a proper legal recourse people should just drive them out of business. Some points to note in the contracts: they own and operate the common amneties.
While they mention penalty for non-performance they hardly ever pay (i’m sure they quote examples but don’t be fooled). More often then not they charge hard-working home owners late payment penalty otherwise they won’t hand over the keys. Also, watch out for a clause which allows them to increase the rates per sq. ft if the market conditions become adverse.
I recently (early Dec 09) got invited to a house warming ceremony (guess where) to Jain Sudarshana (at Rajakeepakkam, Chennai). The tale of woes from this lot is endless. They have formed a Yahoo group to try and address their woes collectively but stil continue to have challenges. The main issue I could tell from the construction were:
QUALITY (abysmal): Not a single floor or wall was straight, the plastering was attrocious, the tiles in some places were loose, the tiling had so many gaps and uneven that one could tell the poor quality finish with a naked eye, they had cleaned the place well before handover and worse they had leakage issues even before they moved in!! I really felt sorry for the folks who had bought the place. Hard-working & honest families don’t deserve this.
Completeness: The common area was as if the building was still under construction (the floor tiling had layers of cement, the stair case has many broken tiles and the railings were completely rusted) but Jains claimed that things were completed and if people didn’t move they were threatning them with penalty/late charged.
Late handover -> The place was to be completed in Sep 08 but a year later 2 block were still under construction with no sign of completion. Yet Jains were refusing to pay any penalty which is as per their contract. Instead they were unscruplously charging late payment fees to house owners refusing to handover if they dind’t pay the late fee. What exactly is the legal recourse we have for such builders in the country. Can we take any collective action/campaingn to stop them from building any further and compensate existing flat owners in their projects.