No end to home wait misery for Perth couple, as dramas continue to beset their house build

So near, yet so far. Abhijeet Kale and wife Sonal Deshmukh wonder if they’ll ever get into their home after the latest setback in their seemingly cursed build. The couple were among victims of the Flexible Homes fiasco exposed by The Sunday Times last year. Flexible Homes went into liquidation in June last year, but not before its two directors inserted a dummy director — a vulnerable drug addict — to be the fall guy for the company, as they tried to walk away from their customers and commitments. Several Flexible Homes customers were shocked to find out their contracts were actually with other builders, meaning they couldn’t claim against their home indemnity insurance. Mr Kale and Ms Deshmukh discovered their own contract was with a company called Distinctive Building Services. They were recently awarded $53,000 in compensation by the State Administrative Tribunal over building delays on their home. But Distinctive Building director Marwan Hassan last week told them he couldn’t afford to pay the sum. Meanwhile, all building work has stopped on the Piara Waters home, which is about 90 per cent complete. The couple told The Sunday Times the stress was affecting their health, and claim they will have to fork out more than $10,000 to go to court in an effort to force Distinctive Building to pay the money owed them. Every day, they visit the build site in the hope of seeing progress. “It’s become our daily routine,” Mr Kale said. “When I come from work, I pick up my wife from the train station, and then we go to the site to check whether (the builder) is doing anything or not.” There had been no work performed for weeks, they said. “It’s a dilemma, we don’t know what to do next,” Mr Kale said, adding the industry regulator, Building and Energy, had been little help to them. SAT senior member David Aitken in June found the couple were entitled to $42,805 compensation to cover the cost of their rent from January 10 last year — when their home should contractually have been completed. “I find . . . the builder has breached the terms of the contract by not completing the construction of the dwelling by the finish date,” he said. Mr Aitken also ordered the builder to pay $10,704.85 in legal costs. Distinctive Building was ordered to pay the sums by July 29. It has since tried to re-open the case, but the proceeding was dismissed on August 9 by senior member Patricia Le Miere as “misconceived or lacking in substance”. Ms Deshmukh said on leaving the latest hearing, Mr Hassan told her he was unable to pay. Mr Hassan last week said he needed to finish the house first, which meant getting the final progress payment (of $37,000) from the couple. “All I said (to them) was ‘let me finish the house’ and then I can organise the payment for the rent they paid,” he said. “They signed with Flexible Homes originally. Flexible Homes subcontracted me to do it, but then Flexible Homes went into liquidation. “The delays were due to Flexible. They hadn’t even done the slab, whereas we had the (house) plans for under a year and have nearly finished the house . . . we’ve been doing exceptionally well.” Mr Hassan had engaged his brother Kareem Hassan of Platinum Homes to work on the Piara Waters home. A Platinum Homes sign has been put in the front window. “My brother actually loaned me the money to do the necessary completions,” Marwan Hassan said. As well as being a builder, Kareem Hassan is also a director of the Up In Smoke tobacco chain — charged in 2022 under WA’s vaping crackdown, having items seized from its Morley cafe and shisha lounge that tested positive for nicotine. Last November, the company was fined $4000 in Perth Magistrates Court after pleading guilty to one count of manufacturing or supplying a controlled or prescription drug. Building and Energy is taking disciplinary action against former Flexible Homes director Pavreet Singh and managing director Touhidul Islam Sunny. As revealed by The Sunday Times last year, the two men started the company in 2020, just after the State and Federal Government injected free money into the residential construction industry in the form of generous grants to customers. They resigned as directors on February 2 last year. Liquidator Kim Wallman said he believed the company may have been insolvent “from at least 1 July 2022”. The company had liabilities of almost $700,000 and failed to maintain adequate books and records, he said. Both Mr Singh and Mr Sunny were directors of DBS for a short period of three weeks in 2021.