Land Rubble Dispute: City Sale Claim

Builder Lukáš Adámek solved a question that many young families face two years ago. He and his wife were expecting their second child, and the two-room apartment in Venátky nad Jizerou was getting too small for them.

So when he heard that the city was going to auction land in the Dražice part, he applied with an offer.

“I know it here, my grandmother is from here, I used to go here on vacation. I remember the green meadow and the horses here since the nineties. Moreover, it was directly from the city, so I didn’t expect any complications. No one expected that there could be something underground here,” describes Adámek.

He is talking to a Seznam Zpráv reporter in front of his house under construction. The construction looks like it could be complete in a few months, but even so, Adámek doesn’t have much joy in his voice.

“Come and see, there’s still something left here,” he invites to the exposed foundations.

There, pieces of bricks, protruding wires and other material that does not resemble ordinary soil can be recognized under the terrain. His neighbors, also the new owners of the land, encountered the same thing.

Seznam The news previously drew attention to a case from Hošťálkovice in Ostrava, where people found waste under land purchased from the municipality. Now they describe other similar cases.

They bought the plot from the city of Adámko two years ago at a price of 4,300 crowns per meter. The entire plot therefore cost approximately 3.2 million crowns. Adámek came across construction waste underground when he had a geological survey carried out before the construction of his family home.

“From this it turned out that there is some kind of contamination here, so it was reported to the city. There they told us that we can be calm, that there was some residue from when they were building the access road here. So we left it alone,” adds Lukáš Adámek.

But the discovery did not end there. “Then we wanted to fence the land so we could start loading the material, but we stopped there, because a hole for a post is waste. We started arguing with the city, we went through historical maps and found out that there was a silage pit here. Then we found a circular silo. We dug up over 50 tons of material,” the man recounts.

Along with that, he also exported ash, slag, glass, plastics and packaging material.

As a builder, it was clear to him that a family house cannot be built on such a foundation. “There was a geotechnician, a specialist in the foundation of buildings, who recommended a solution. Either put it under a basement, which would delay the construction and thus miss the deadlines, or take the material away and replace it with another,” explains Adámek, adding that he ultimately decided on the second option. In addition, he paid 60 thousand crowns for a soil test, which confirmed that the waste does not contain dangerous substances.

Compared to the original calculations, the construction of the family house became considerably more expensive. “The material cost an additional 669,000 crowns. In addition, tens of thousands for probes and geotechnics. We were supposed to start the foundation for 546,000, we ended up with 1.2 million. The whole thing had to be redesigned, the finances, which were on the roof, were swallowed up by the foundation,” calculates Adámek.

His neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Caithaml, tell a similar story. Even for those, the costs have increased considerably compared to the original plan. “We are having the house realized as a turnkey delivery. According to the contract, the price increase for the base plate of the house alone amounts to 310,000 crowns, to which additional additional work discovered during the implementation in the amount of approximately 109,000 can also be expected. An increase in the costs of establishing the foundation for the garden house can also be expected,” describes Kateřina Caithamlová.

Lukáš Adámek emphasizes that if he had known about the hidden material, he would not have bought the plot. The city is now requesting payment of 669,000 for the material.

“We took a picture of it and sent it to the city as a complaint about the purchased defect. There they replied that the only option was to withdraw from the contract. We wrote to them that we had already invested, so let them give us four million and we would withdraw. They didn’t want that,” Adámek points out.

Seznam The News contacted representatives of Benátek nad Jizerou, but they apologized saying that they would not comment on the situation. “This matter is being handled by our legal representatives and for this reason we will not comment on it publicly,” said the secretary of the municipal office, Marek Mařík.

Withdrawal from the contract as the only solution, according to their claims, was proposed by the city and to the Caithamls. “However, we did not proceed with this solution, because by the time the real condition of the land was discovered, the price of the study to the architect and the project documentation to the construction company had already been paid. Withdrawing from the contract would mean a direct financial loss of approximately 500 thousand crowns for us, not to mention the loss of time,” says Kateřina Caithamlová.

“We sent five requests for an out-of-court settlement of relations. They replied that they would not respond, that nothing bad had happened for them, that they did not know about it, and that they were handling public finances from which they cannot pay the damage,” claims Adámek. And he emphasizes that the city may have encountered the waste already during the construction of a nearby road.

He is now solving the dispute with the help of a legal representative. If they don’t get the money, the Adams are willing to sue.

According to lawyer Marko Klauz, who deals with real estate law, the above information implies that buyers should be “in the right”.

“In general terms, from the way you describe the case, it seems to be a hidden defect, that is, a defect that already existed at the time of the transfer of ownership, i.e. when the land was purchased, but the buyers could not detect it even during a thorough inspection – the defect was only discovered through a geological survey – which, of course, may not be of interest to the buyer. The seller is responsible for defective performance anyway,” says Klauz.

According to him, the seller, i.e. in this case the municipality, is responsible for defects. “The seller is responsible for defects, even if he did not know about the defects, because there is so-called objective responsibility for defective performance,” adds the lawyer.