My Castle In The Sky

A couple of years ago, I invested in a condo not very far from where I currently live. I used up almost all my savings just to be able to put a down payment and all that for the place. It was and still is in a pretty good location. I was pretty excited back then when I first purchased it.

The place was a sell out, with all the units being snapped up pretty fast. I even convinced my best buddy to buy a place there and he did indeed buy one, about a couple of floors above me. We didn't want to be seen as staying too near to each other ... LOL!

The facilities that came with the place was pretty good too. You know, the usual swimming pools, tennis courts, a mini theater, laundry services and better yet, they were planning to have a hypermarket on the ground level.

Now that would have made shopping so much easier, no need to drive out through jams looking for parkings and all that. All I had to do was just take the elevator down and viola, the hypermarket! But unfortunately all that came to a disappointment. The condo was supposed to be ready a few years back, but unfortunately, the darn developers abandoned the project. They took everyone's hard earned money and just ran!

And the excuse they gave was that the material cost had gone up and that they didn't have any foreign workers. I mean, come on, didn't they take into account the cost of material for the next couple of years. And no foreign workers? What kind of excuse is that? Hire some new ones for gods sake! And further more, for them to even start work, the banks would have already released some amount of funds from the loans everyone took to buy the place.

Don't these people have any conscience at all? They worst thing is, the condo I bought falls under the commercial category or something like that and there really isn't any laws protecting buyers like me who invested everything they have in buying the place. The most painful thing is seeing the place half built rotting away everyday on my way to work and not knowing if anything is being done to revive the project. They did try to revive it once with new developers taking over but even that failed eventually.

That project abandonment played a huge impact in my life financially. It took a huge toll on my finance cos I had to pay the current house rent on top of the interest for the bank loan on the condo, which was not cheap mind you. I suffered quite a bit at one time just trying to sort the darn thing out. And it's still not really sorted out yet. In fact I don't really have any confidence that it will ever be sorted out.

I wish there was some kind of laws that could help me get my money back or something like what they have in the US where they have this construction attorneys to safeguard the rights by filling out conditional lien release forms. At least they do have some kind of protection. Unlike me where I seriously don't know where to turn to either get the condo project revived or atleast get some of my money back.

I know for a fact that if they do eventually revive the project, I'm going to sell the place and buy something somewhere else. I don't think I'd wanna stay there now after all the bad karma that's been associated with the place. But until then I'm going to be paying the bank interest for a non existent place! Sighhh and as if life isn't difficult enough!
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