For sale: Brand-new apartment in used condition

The owners of second-story apartments in a new luxury residential tower in Givatayim called a professional apartment examiner in a panic. Signs of dampness had appeared in their bathrooms and the managment company could not find the source of the leak. Although no defect was found in the pipeline, there was water around the pipe.

The professionals followed the water's trail, which led to the third floor, then to the fourth and fifth floors, and finally to the penthouse, where they ultimately located the source of the leak in one of the air conditioning systems.

The contractor's work teams found it difficult to explain how a leak on the top floor had reached four floors below it, but the reason is quite simple: the installation team "forgot" that the high-density polyethylene (HDPE) pipes used to drain the dirty water contract up to 10 times more than other sewage pipes, leaving space around them that can fill up with water. For this reason, professionals in Europe and the United States usually attach a flange that will prevent any water that collects from escaping. Such flanges are manufactured in Israel, but Israeli installers are not in the habit of using them.

In this case the contractor's attempt to save on the minimal cost of adding a few pieces of metal around the pipes led to the halting of operations in the whole building.

Buying an apartment directly from the building contractor is considered a guarantee of quality. Many buyers prefer to pay a little more for the peace of mind that accompanies moving into a brand-new apartment.

This assumed sense of security, however, sometimes turns out to be false - either immediately or after a few years. A lack of professionalism, the absence of supervision, fraud and negligence are unfortunately commonplace in many areas of the Israeli economy, and building procedures are no exception.

"Wherever you point your finger in an apartment, you'll find room for a potential defect," says Rafi Maimon, the professional director of the Building College at the Israeli Building Center, noting that the main difficulty in listing all the potential defects lies in the large number and variety of possibilities.

Some 3,000 suits totaling NIS 600 million are filed each year against contractors for faulty construction, according to the Israel Standards Institute (ISI). Thirty-four percent of these defects concern problems with dampness.

"Dampness causes extensive damage due to the relatively long period of time it takes to discover it," says Maimon. "The problem is usually discovered only after wet stains appear in the paintwork, after the substructure has already been damaged or mildew appears, and sometimes only after the water reaches acidic materials left during the construction process, leading to damaged pipes or the steel framework."

"Water damage is usually caused by faulty installation work, or it's due to negligence or a lack of professionalism by workers and inspectors," says architect Yitzhak Lazar, head of the ISI's construction quality department.

A contractor's workers, for example, tend to make mistakes in connecting pipes, or to unintentionally damage them. Cleaning company workers called in right before a buyer is handed the keys hurriedly wash floors with jets of water that often reaches the sand under the floor, causing water to be trapped. This is not discovered until the paint adjacent to the flooring starts to peel or mildew starts to grow between the floor tiles.

Other contractors tend to ignore the need for a "hidden threshold" under the floor between a porch or doorway and the inside of the house, whose absence can allow water to seep in from the outside via the sand under the tiles.

A worse defect that is just as common is the use of inferior sealing materials, particularly bitumen sheeting, often imported illegally from Jordan at a third the price of standard quality materials. The inferior waterproof sheeting lacks plastic reinforcement substances, and cracks more easily.

Sealing contractors have found another way to save money on materials - by using thinner than standard sheeting (5 millimeters, or 1/5 inch). One sealing contractor who recently won a government tender worth millions of shekels was caught trying to arrange the import of substandard sheeting from Europe in order to cut costs, and without telling his employer. Other common fraudulent practices are the dilution of the glue used to affix the sheeting to concrete and the spraying of too little sealant on external walls.

"About 19 percent of suits filed against contractors concern the flooring or wall coverings," says Lazar. Such suits range from the use of defective materials (floor tiles with broken corners, uneven surfaces or color inconsistencies), to defective substructure caused by the use of inferior sand mixed with building waste; or layers of plaster that are too thick or too thin; poor quality plaster or an uneven subsurface.

"More commonly, problems are actually caused after a floor is laid," continues Lazar. "Workers forget to protect the floor with cardboard, for example, and walk on it too soon, causing some tiles to sink. As for wall coverings, faulty workmanship (or sloppy inspectors) can even lead to bodily harm. Last month a 5-year-old boy from Hod Hasharon was critically injured by a marble slab that fell off the facade of a nearby building, and the contractor is now suspected of negligence in anchoring the slab to the concrete wall.

"Faulty electrical wiring in apartments is less common in new apartments, but fixing wiring problems is both troublesome and dangerous," continues Lazar. "The unwise distribution of electrical sockets can lead to the overloading of one of the circuits. Insufficient sockets in the modern home office leads to the overuse of multiple socket plugs, which are unsafe."

All sheetrock frames and metal used in construction must be grounded, and even hammering one nail into the wrong place can incur the risk of electrocution, he warns.

The plumbing system also provides many opportunities for defects.

"In an air pressure test of drainage systems, 80 percent of them did not pass the test," relates Lazar. "There is insufficient supervision of sewage systems in Israel, and these tend to leak until the first signs of damage are visible on bathroom door frames."

As if that were not enough, Israeli contractors frequently use copper pipes, because they do not rust. The contractors often forget, however, that copper expands when heated, and if expansion room is not left in the concrete space around the pipes, these can cause cracks in the concrete during the hot summer months.

Whereas most of the defects mentioned so far can be repaired to one degree or another, an even worse problem is faced by buyers of apartments who discover planning and construction faults. In such cases, the engineers must sometimes step aside in favor of assessors and lawyers.

Incorrect planning of the building's frame and faulty construction are the grounds for 32 percent of suits filed against contractors and account for 43 percent of the compensation demanded in all such suits.

Most of these suits are based on passageways that are too narrow (80-100 centimeters, or 32-39 inches is the minimum), substandard window space (at least 8 percent of a room's area), the faulty hanging of doors or uneven plaster.

Appraiser Levi Yitzhak says that the deficient installation of soundproofing insulation between floors reduces the value of regular apartments by 3-5 percent, and of luxury apartments by up to 8 percent.

Excessive exposure to noise (from an elevator or the sewage system) can be due to the faulty planning of the apartment's location and entitle owners to compensation of up to 10 percent of the apartment's value.