Toronto Life has a very eye opening article about the condo industry in Toronto and I find it rather depressing. I was shocked to read how much profit these developers are making from a single condo tower. (40 MILLION dollars or more) That's crazy! And these guys cheap out on the smallest things? What developers are allowed to get away with just blows my mind but the article does say they gave almost 10 million dollars of donations to the Conservative and Liberal parties, (almost nothing to NDP lol) so I guess I shouldn't be too shocked. I still think it's wrong to let developers build such shoddy products.
If you are planning to buy a condo in Toronto, I advise you guys to read the article or if you just want to learn how screwed up things are. The greed is out of control.
http://www.torontolife.com/daily/informer/from-print-edition-informer/2012/07/24/faulty-towers/
Read it and weep.
wow, how sad and scary ... and there's alot more of it. i really recommend reading the article:
Last summer, a man I’ll call Jeff moved into a
brand new 800-square-foot Liberty Village condo with concrete floors and a west-facing window wall. This was his second condo, and he was one of the first to move into his new tower. At first it seemed perfect, though he noticed some cut corners: the epoxy coating on the cement floor was laid only after his kitchen was installed, for example. “The floor beneath my cabinets is just unvarnished concrete,” he says. “If I ever want to remodel my kitchen, that will be a problem.” But he wasn’t planning on remodelling the kitchen any time soon. If that was the extent of his condo’s problems, he could live with it. It only took a few days of summer sun to discover a
far more serious problem. “The entire window wall system expands in the heat, to the point where it actually moves away from the interior wall,” says Jeff. To be more precise: as it expands it bows outwards and separates from his interior wall, creating a lengthy floor-to-ceiling crack where the drywall meets the window wall frame. At the peak of the summer heat,
the space between his interior wall and window wall grew to a full inch or more—enough room for him to put his finger through.
... Jeff’s problem is worse than that.
His window wall is malfunctioning mere months after completion. “I don’t know if the problem is due to poor workmanship or poor design,” he says. “But I would expect that it doesn’t comply with the building code. And I don’t know how to address the problem without tearing out my entire exterior wall.” He says he’s not worried that his window will pop out and fall if he leans on it, but he is worried that water is going to get in behind it and cause further damage.
