Legal effects of concluding contracts for the purchase of residential buildings from housing cooperatives by cooperative members and a non-members

Abstract

The motivation for writing this article was that I, as a solicitor, have conducted 18 court cases on behalf of persons who had actions brought against them by housing cooperatives aiming to terminate residential con­struction contracts concluded in 2010 and 2011 by and between the cooperatives and my clients. A common factor for all my clients was that they were not members of the housing cooperatives at the time they entered into these contracts. After becoming housing cooperative members in 2012, my clients concluded the contracts in the form of notarial deeds: first preliminary and then final contracts. All clients paid the agreed-upon price for house construc­tion. This is because, at the time, residential construction contracts could only be concluded with cooperative mem­bers and my clients only acquired membership later in 2012. Between 2015 and 2016, the housing cooperatives brought actions against my clients, demanding that the contracts they concluded with the clients be declared void. The validity and relevance of the problem I have researched are evidenced by the fact that some of the court pro­ceedings have not resulted in a final decision to this day. The research aims to determine the validity of the contracts entered into by my clients in connection with their purchases of buildings from housing cooperatives. The most significant problem was the ‘commencement’ of the acquisition process without being a cooperative member. To this end, I used the method of dogmatic analysis of the law and interpreted the legal provisions and court decisions in force throughout the period (from 2010 until today), as well as the most important decision of the Constitutional Tribunal on this issue, i.e. that of 5 February 2015. I have answered the question of whether the lack of cooperative member status at the time of concluding a building construction contract could render the contract null and void, and therefore, whether the claims of housing cooperatives deserve to be dismissed or admitted.