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A buyer who signs a contract for a 500-million-soum apartment in Uzbekistan and later tries to cancel it can lose between 50 million and 60 million soums — not as a percentage of what they have already paid, but as a percentage of the full purchase price. That is the practical effect of penalty clauses that Kun.uz found embedded in contracts offered by a significant share of the country’s construction companies, and the pattern extends far beyond any single developer.
The arithmetic is stark. A buyer who has put down an initial payment of 150 million soums and then seeks a refund — because construction has stalled, or for any other reason — faces a contractual deduction of 10 to 12 percent of the total apartment value. On a 500-million-soum unit, that means the developer retains between 50 million and 60 million soums, a sum that can exceed the entire deposit already paid. The clause, as written, does not distinguish between a buyer who walks away capriciously and one whose developer has failed to build.
Penalties That Run in One Direction
The same contracts impose far lighter obligations on developers who miss their own deadlines. Late-delivery penalties are typically set at 0.01 to 0.05 percent of the contract value per day, with a ceiling — often 5 or 10 percent of the total price — beyond which the penalty stops accumulating regardless of how long the delay continues. On a 500-million-soum apartment, a developer who delivers a year late would owe a daily penalty of roughly 50,000 soums — the price of a bowl of soup in Tashkent, as Kun.uz noted — and even that sum requires the buyer to pursue the developer through the courts to collect.
The structural imbalance is not anecdotal. A report presented in July 2026, based on an examination of 129 shared-equity construction contracts, found that 51 percent contained no liability whatsoever for the developer in the event of late delivery. Eighty-four percent of the contracts lacked any warranty period for the finished property. In 80 percent of cases, recalculation clauses gave priority to the developer’s interests. Contracts that treated both parties’ rights equally accounted for just 20 percent of those reviewed.
Regulator Acknowledgement, No Mandatory Standards
The Competition Committee has acknowledged the problem. After Kun.uz published an investigation in September 2025 into unfair contract terms — using Imarat Development as a case study — the committee confirmed it had received thousands of complaints from citizens and formally characterised such clauses as contrary to law. Yet the absence of mandatory minimum requirements for shared-equity construction contracts means the conditions that generated those complaints remain in place across the sector.
The consequence is a market in which tens of thousands of people seeking to buy homes are exposed to terms that would be unenforceable in many jurisdictions but remain standard practice here. Until minimum contractual standards are legislated and enforced, buyers who sign today face the same asymmetry: heavy penalties if they exit, negligible ones if the developer fails to deliver.