Every builder’s brochure is about the day you move in. Almost none is about the fifth year, which is strange, because that is when you find out what you bought. This is about the fifth year.
The usual pattern
A building is handed over. For a period, sometimes a year, sometimes less, the builder manages it: security, cleaning, the lift contract, the generator. Then the owners’ association is formed, the builder hands over the accounts and the keys to the pump room, and leaves. From that point the building is the owners’ problem.
This is legal and normal. Under RERA the builder remains liable for structural defects for five years, but liability is not the same as involvement. In practice, most owners’ associations in Kochi are run by volunteers with jobs, learning as they go, and the building’s condition in year five depends on whether they learned fast enough.
What we do instead
We stay in contact. Every building we have handed over has a named person at Arya Bhangy that its residents and association can call, and that person answers. The point is not the mechanism but that there is one, years later.
We do not treat the five-year defect liability as a deadline to run out. If something is ours, we fix it, without an argument about whose fault it is. Buildings in Kochi are tested by the monsoon, the salt air and the years, and things surface in the second or third year that no inspection at handover could have found. When they do, in our buildings, we come back.
We help the owners’ association find its feet: the accounts, the maintenance contracts, the drawings and manuals, and an introduction to the lift and generator contractors who know the building. A building is managed well in year five because it was set up well in year one.
And we know our buildings by name. There are not so many of them that any has become the one we have forgotten.
Why we do it
Part of it is simple. The group has been in business in Kochi since 1969, and the family’s name is on the gate. A building that goes wrong in year five is a building with our name on it going wrong, and everyone who passes it knows. That is a strong incentive that a company without a name to protect does not have.
Part of it is how we came to building. The family’s first business was handcrafted doors, and a door is a product you cannot hide poor work on. It is the first thing every visitor sees and every owner touches, every day, for decades. You learn, in that trade, that the customer’s opinion of you is formed over years, not at the point of sale. We brought that with us.
And part of it is that it works. More than a hundred families live in homes we built, and many of the newer ones came to us because someone in an older building told them to. A building that is still well kept in year five is worth more to its owners and to us than any campaign.
What a homeowner said
One resident of Rhinestone put it this way, five years after moving in: the builder still looks after the older projects like their own, and that kind of commitment is rare in Kochi. [Link to the Mohana Kumaran testimonial.] We would add only that it should not be rare, and that it is worth asking any builder, before you buy, what they will be doing in year five.
What to ask
Ask any builder for the name of a building they handed over five or more years ago and permission to visit it. Then ask the residents two questions: whether the builder is still contactable, and whether they have ever needed them to be. The answers are the only reliable measure of what you are about to buy.