In St. Petersburg, a certain married couple acquired an apartment in the house of 1885. In preparing for the repairs, it turned out that one of the walls of the apartment had a crack from the ceiling to the floor with a depth of 54 cm. The couple turned to the seller of the apartment with a demand to compensate the cost of repairing the cracked wall since, when buying the apartment, the spouses did not know about the real size of the defect, although they saw the hole in the wall, but it did not scare them very much at the time, and the owner (seller of the apartment) was obliged to bear the burden of maintaining their property and carry out the necessary repairs, but did not do so.
Representing the seller in case 2-2766/2022, considered in the Moscow District Court of St. Petersburg, we pointed out that the wall defect could not have gone unnoticed during the inspection and purchase of the apartment. The buyers in the process did not deny this fact, although they did not confirm it, in connection with which the selling price of the apartment, from our point of view and from the point of view of our client, took into account the potential costs of repairs. Moreover, for a house built in 1885, such defects in apartments are typical, and they do not arise due to the fault of the owners, but as a result of normal operational wear and tear (soil movement, imperfection of building materials, shells hitting the house during the Great Patriotic War).
The court agreed with our arguments and refused to recover the cost of repairs from the seller.
