The Cabinet of Ministers supported the initiative of the Ministry for Communities, Territories and Internally Displaced Persons to introduce a minimum 10-year warranty on the quality of new real estate – from the moment of their acceptance for operation. The Government portal reported this on Thursday, September 10.
Until now, a flat buyer was essentially left alone with construction defects. Cracks in the foundation, roof leaks or ventilation problems were often discovered a year or two after moving in, when warranty obligations (if they were even written into the contract) had already expired. Repairs fell on the owner's shoulders – and this is precisely the logic the Ministry of Regional Development is attempting to change.
"We propose to introduce a minimum 10-year warranty on the quality of the property. If during this period the owner discovers defects that affect the operational suitability of the property, they will be able to demand the construction customer to eliminate them," said Deputy Minister Natalia Kozlovska.
How the mechanism will work in practice
The scheme works like this: the owner discovers a defect, confirms it with a report from a certified specialist, and notifies the construction customer. They have 30 days to propose a solution and timeline for eliminating the defect – or provide a substantiated refusal. The owner can agree with the proposal within seven days or refuse and hire their own workers, and the customer must then fully compensate the costs.
The construction customer or their successor is responsible for the quality of the property throughout the entire warranty period. This is an important clarification: if a developer company disappears or reorganizes, the obligations transfer to whoever took over its assets, rather than dissolving into thin air.
Who falls outside the new rules
The warranty will not apply to properties built on the basis of a construction passport, nor to individual structures with minor consequences (CC1 class) if work was performed in-house. That is, private houses that owners built themselves without engaging a contractor with full cycle responsibility do not fall under this protection system.
This creates an interesting discrepancy: right now, according to LUN Statistics, demand for private houses is noticeably increasing in central and southern regions and the capital area. Some buyers who are fleeing multi-apartment construction for the private sector risk being left without the same guarantees that residents of new multi-apartment buildings will receive.
Questions of price and trust
The Ministry of Regional Development proposes to amend the Civil Code and the laws "On Regulating Construction Activities" and "On Consumer Protection." But any additional responsibility for the customer means additional risks that sooner or later are factored into the price per square meter. And prices are already rising: in Lviv, the median cost of a square meter in new construction reached 67,500 hryvnia, or approximately $1,500.
There is also a reputational context that makes this initiative timely: at the beginning of September in Odesa, a founder of a cooperative was reported as a suspect for building 47 townhouses near the sea under the guise of a hotel. Such schemes emerge precisely where customer responsibility is blurred and the buyer has no clear leverage.
The main question is whether the state will be able to monitor the enforcement of these guarantees in practice. If the developer does not respond within 30 days or gives a formal refusal, and the owner does not have a real enforcement mechanism, the 10-year warranty risks remaining on paper, like so many previous construction standards.
