In April edition of The Cyprus Weekly I read an item headed “Illegal estate agents – stopping cowboys” by Antonis Loizou. No matter what legislation is brought in and no matter the size of estate agents there will always be people working for these offices whose only aim is to get a sale to get their commission.
In January 2004 my husband and I, both retired people, came to Cyprus in order to get a small apartment here in order to spend the winter months in better weather for health reasons.
We thought we were doing everything correctly by going to a large estate agency on the island.
We have found out since, to our regret, we might as well have gone to anyone of the thousands of unregistered people trying to sell property.
We were introduced to what we term “a developer from hell” who promised the apartment block he was building would be finished by May 2004 and we could move in the next month June, which was 5 months later.
We are living in this virtually empty block of 15 apartments in basic conditions, as the so-called developer, who is really a waiter at the army base, has hit financial problems.
The agency that introduced us and arranged the sale do not want to know, as we were told by them we should have checked this out ourselves beforehand.
The lawyer, to whom we were also introduced to by the salesman from the estate agency, paid over all our money before the apartment was completed, and now tells us it would be a waste of time suing the developer for breach of the contract he signed, as he has no money.
The supervising architect informs us that he has written to the Paralimni Municipality accepting no more responsibility for the building, as it has not been built to the required standards it should have adhered to, and he will not sign it off.
The Municipality of Paralimni says there if nothing they can do, even though the building has not been built according to the plans, we need to take the developer to court to get it righted.
So when we read the article in your paper today, it gave no indication of any organisation that monitors the state agents when things go wrong as they have done in our case and there must be many, many more cases such as ours.
Maybe you will pass on our letter to him to get this information to pass on to your readers.
Barry & Mary Parnham,
Paralimni
Copyright © Cyprus Weekly April 15 2005
