Buyers who discovered construction defects in their apartment, prevented the seller from fixing the defects and repaired them without his help.
The Court awarded the buyers partial compensation due to them preventing the seller from correcting the defects. Israeli law requires the buyer of an apartment to allow the seller to correct a fixable discrepancy or defect and imposes on the seller the obligation to correct the defect within a reasonable time. Preventing the seller from correcting the defects does not completely negate the buyer's right to compensation for the repair costs, but the compensation will be reduced from the cost of repair by a third party contractor to the repair costs that the seller would have borne had he made the repair himself. Here, the buyers practically denied the contractor, who was also the seller, the opportunity of correcting the defects himself. Therefore, they are not entitled to the full compensation but only to a reduced compensation amount that reflects the costs the contractor saved by not carrying out the repairs himself.