How much do you know about the Interstate Land Sales Full Disclosure Act? If you made a deposit for a new-construction condo in 2006 and found yourself with a contract but no condo two or three years later, the law might have come up in discussion. Then again, maybe it didn’t — I don’t recall the act being mentioned during our readers’ complaints about GlasHaus or Lexington Park Condominiums. (I have heard it discussed a few times by attorneys and Realtors over the past three years, but never in official, on-the-record conversations.)
The New York Times reports that buyers in New York and other states are successfully voiding their contracts and walking away with their deposits thanks to ILSA, which was passed in 1968 “to protect buyers of out-of-state land from unscrupulous developers or brokers.” According to the Times, “lawyers have won back deposits for errors as simple as failing to give buyers a legal description of the property or to register the building with the Department of Housing and Urban Development, a basic requirement that many companies nonetheless overlooked.”