Construction delay without completion. The house simply is not finished

Hello everyone,

I would like to know if you have had similar experiences or if you possibly have a helpful tip on how to best deal with the situation.

We bought a terraced house from a small developer in NRW at the beginning of 2021. The planned completion was 12/2021. However, 03/2022 was recorded in the notarial contract.

Now it is already 07/2022 and currently only the shell including windows and electrical wiring is finished.

It is such that for weeks nothing happens on the construction site and then sporadically a craftsman works on it. In the entire year 2022, maybe 20 days of work were done on the house.

The flat roof has been in progress for 4 months and is still not finished.

We are repeatedly reassured by the developer and assured that everyone is making an effort to move things forward. (Sometimes someone is sick due to Corona, or the craftsmen don’t come, or the windows are not delivered, etc.)

But we also do not receive any current completion date or written information about a delay or planned completion.

Have you had similar experiences? Has this approach become normal during Corona times? Have you had similar delays in house construction?

Do we even have a way to take action against this?

Communication in the construction industry seems to be generally somewhat tedious, and almost everyone probably experiences delays. For example, work on my roof has been going on forever, seemingly only when the carpenters have a day off (no pressure as the roof tiles are not yet available...).

But it could also be something else causing the problem. I don't want to scare you, but some companies have obviously underestimated the price increases quite badly. If there are then 14 row houses where nothing is progressing, I would also consider the possibility of an impending insolvency. One sign of this seems to be constant postponements and hardly any work being done. In this case, it would mainly be about securing your claims. But this is hard to say from a remote diagnosis.