Battersea power station home buyers to claim refunds due to long delays
People that purchased flats in the redevelopment of London’s Battersea Power Station will soon be eligible to claim a full refund with works running so far behind schedule.
The scheme has been plagued with difficulties and the majority of the 255 apartments listed along the River Thames will not be ready before their “long-stop dates” according to the Financial Times.
Read more: London miners push FTSE 100 higher as Vale shuts mine
Current developer, the Battersea Power Station Development Company, acquired the site in 2012 and made more progress than previous owners but the Malaysian-backed scheme has made slow progress.
It is now home to around 1,000 people after the first phase of the project, outside the station itself, was completed, while the tech giant Apple is set to move its European headquarters to the area in 2021.
But the second and third phases of the project have hit further problems and a number of buyers of property within the station have already claimed their deposits back, sources close to the situation told the FT, with one saying that “the long stop dates are blown”.
Dozens of buyers of property in the third phase of the project have also asked for their contracts to be torn up, while there are also a number of properties in the south of the power station that were due to be completed last year, but will soon reach its long-stop date too.
“We are leading the biggest regeneration project in Europe,” Simon Murphy, chief executive of the development company, said. “So of course there have been some big challenges for us to overcome that have been well-documented.”
Read more: Beware of these Tube terrors if you're travelling on the Underground
A spokesperson for the development company also told the FT: “The majority of people who were told two years ago that their apartments were going to be late have opted to stay in despite the delays and despite the state of the market.”
It also denied that phase three properties were being discounted and said it had sold up to £125m worth of apartments within the last year.