A developer misses the delivery date on an off-plan sale, and the buyer reaches for a figure that feels obvious: rent plus mortgage installments, multiplied by the months of delay. That figure is usually wrong, and relying on it is the single most common reason a strong case ends in a weak settlement. The law here rewards precision — in the calculation, in the clause, and in the calendar — far more than it rewards indignation. Here are the six points that determine what a delayed buyer can actually recover.
1. There is no statutory late-delivery penalty, and the deed’s silence is rarely accidental
No text imposes a late-delivery penalty on a VEFA seller. The floor sometimes cited, 1/3,000th of the price per day, appears only at Article R. 231-14 of the Construction and Housing Code, which governs individual home-building contracts, not off-plan sales. A VEFA deed is drafted by the seller, and it will almost always stipulate a penalty against a buyer who pays late — commonly 1% per month under Article R. 261-14 — while staying silent on the seller’s own delay. That asymmetry is not neutral: Article L. 212-1 of the Consumer Code requires an unfair-terms assessment to weigh a clause “by reference to all the other clauses in the contract,” and a deed that penalizes only one side of the same failure is an argument worth raising even though no published ruling has yet endorsed it. Where the deed is silent, compensation still follows, but it must be for harm actually proven under Article 1231-1, not for a lump sum — which is precisely why the calculation in Part 4 matters so much.
2. Suspension clauses are valid in principle, but the ruling everyone cites is misread
Almost every VEFA deed lets the developer extend the delivery date for events such as bad weather, certified by the site architect. The Cour de cassation upheld this kind of clause as far back as 24 October 2012, and it is commonly reported that a ruling of 30 April 2025 went further and validated clauses covering contractor default and force majeure too. Reading the actual text (no. 23-21.499) shows otherwise: the clause considered there covered only “force majeure or a legitimate cause of delay suspension such as weather events, among others,” assessed by the architect. The three-part list attributed to that decision — weather, contractor default, force majeure — in fact comes from the 2012 ruling. What the 2025 decision does confirm is narrower and more useful: the clause holds because the architect’s certificates rested on public, verifiable, contestable weather data, not because the architect was independent of the seller. A defense built on the wrong ruling collapses the moment the citation is checked.
3. A contractor’s ordinary delay is not a “default” — proof of termination is required
The tightening that matters is not the 2025 decision but an earlier one, of 2 May 2024. A seller invoked a clause suspending the delivery period “in the event of delay arising from contractor default,” and the Cour de cassation upheld the Bordeaux Court of Appeal’s reading: default, in that clause, means an actual default — requiring that the works contract with the defaulting party was terminated after formal notice. A developer that merely asserts a contractor ran late, without producing the formal notice and the termination letter, has not established a legitimate suspension cause under this line of case law. Requesting those two documents, through a formal demand for disclosure, is often enough by itself to strip out a large share of the suspension days a developer initially claims.
4. Nine heads of loss exist, and the first instinct — rent plus mortgage — double-counts
During a delivery delay, a buyer with an ongoing loan is not repaying principal: drawdowns are staged under Article R. 261-14 (35% at foundations, 70% watertight, 95% at completion), and until the balance is drawn, the buyer pays only bridging interest on capital already released. Claiming “rent plus mortgage installments” therefore counts a cost that has not yet been incurred and invites a reduction that discredits the rest of the claim. The two heads must be kept separate and calculated on their own formulas: double housing costs (rent and charges, minus charges avoided in the new home) and excess credit cost (capital drawn, times the rate, divided by twelve, plus insurance). Seven further heads — lost rental income, the lapsed tax benefit, the zero-interest loan, property tax and VAT timing, loss of enjoyment, incidental costs, and price revision where the deed provides for one — each carry their own evidentiary standard and their own predictable reduction, from rental vacancy allowances to management-fee deductions. A claim that isolates each head, deducts the foreseeable reductions itself, and documents every figure is difficult for a developer to negotiate down; a claim that lumps them together rarely survives a first exchange of correspondence.
5. The completion guarantee protects the building, never the buyer’s delay
The financial completion guarantee (garantie financière d’achèvement, GFA) is often assumed to be a safety net against everything that can go wrong on a VEFA site. It is not. Article R. 261-21 of the Construction and Housing Code limits its scope to “the sums necessary to complete the building” — and Article R. 261-24 ends the guarantee the day the completion certificate is issued, regardless of whether the property has actually been delivered or still carries reservations. A building can be legally “completed,” extinguishing the guarantee, while remaining undelivered and non-conforming. The one action this makes essential is monitoring: notifying the guarantor, the seller and the certifying party of any incompleteness — missing connections, incomplete exterior works, absent accessibility features — before the certificate is issued, since once it is issued the guarantee is gone and cannot be revived even if the certificate turns out to have been premature.
6. Two short deadlines run out while the delay is still being negotiated
Two periods close faster than most buyers expect, and both start running before a delay dispute is typically resolved. Apparent defects and non-conformities are barred one year after delivery: the Third Civil Chamber held, in a published ruling of 13 February 2025, that this one-year period under Article 1648 is exclusive of the ordinary-law regime, so a buyer who lets it lapse while focused on the delay claim loses the ability to act on reservations noted at delivery, with no fallback. The delay claim itself is subject to the five-year period of Article 2224. The more consequential deadline, though, is not statutory: it is delivery itself, the moment the buyer stops holding the 5% balance and stops holding real leverage. Escrowing that balance, or invoking the exception of non-performance under Articles 1217, 1219 and 1220, is available before delivery and largely unavailable after — acting while the balance is still unpaid changes outcomes more reliably than a well-drafted letter sent eighteen months later.
None of these six points depends on an exceptional set of facts — a bad-faith developer, a collapsed construction site, an unusually long delay. They apply to the ordinary case: a delivery running a few months late, a suspension clause the developer invokes as a matter of course, and a buyer doing the arithmetic for the first time. Our practical guide sets out the full calculation methodology for the nine heads of loss, the action calendar from ninety days before the deadline through the five-year limitation period, and the complete framework for dealing with a faltering developer and the completion guarantee.