The half-built tower, the barber, and the law that decides who keeps the unit

IThe half-built tower

At the corner of Beta Avenue and Lougheed Highway in Burnaby, the Eclipse at Lumina Brentwood is a thirty-four-storey concrete tower that is, by the most recent count, roughly 95 percent complete. There are 329 units inside it (per Thind Properties' filings; KingSett's filings cite 335). 232 of them were pre-sold over 2021, 2022, and 2023. From the corner, the building looks finished — glass on most of the floors, balconies in place, the tall slab silhouette typical of any Brentwood mid-cycle project.

The City of Burnaby suspended the building permits in November 2024. Construction stopped. KingSett Mortgage Corp., the senior lender, was owed $189 million on Eclipse alone as of December 27, 2024 — a figure that had climbed to roughly $225 million by December 2025 — and $500 million across the developer's broader portfolio of stalled BC residential projects, with interest accruing at approximately $54,000 per day. The crane at the top is still up. Construction was "deemed substantially complete" by mid-March 2026; an occupancy permit was issued on April 10, 2026.

According to BC Assessment, the assessed value of the Eclipse tower fell from $257 million in July 2024 to $185 million in July 2025. Nearly seventy million dollars of that drop was in the value of the building itself.

The unresolved question is whether the eventual occupant of each of those units will be the original presale buyer, the senior lender, an institutional investor, or — increasingly likely for many of the units — a court-supervised receiver running a structured sales process and pocketing the difference between the 2022 presale price and the 2026 resale value.

IIThe man who built it

The developer's name is Daljit Thind. He was born in the village of Rachian, in the Ludhiana district of Punjab, and earned a Bachelor of Science from Rohtak University with the intention of pursuing pharmacy. He immigrated to Canada in the early 1990s (sources vary between 1990 and 1992), where his Indian credentials did not transfer for professional licensing. He took work as a tile layer, then moved across the other trades. He kept working.

In 1996 he bought his first development lot, in Surrey, and lost roughly twenty thousand dollars on it. In 1997 he bought a teardown in Burnaby and broke even. From 1998 onward he kept building, and over the next twenty-five years built more than a hundred single-family homes, then mid-rise condominium projects, then the concrete towers that have been the centre of his portfolio for the last decade.

On August 7, 2023, the Province of British Columbia named Daljit Thind to the Order of British Columbia, the highest civilian honour the province confers, citing his record as a developer and his contributions to housing supply in the Lower Mainland.

Eighteen months later, his company entered creditor protection in BC Supreme Court.

IIIThe tax bill nobody told the buyers about

The collapse, like most collapses, was visible to the people closest to it long before it was visible to anyone else. On June 30, 2023 — five weeks before the Province would announce Thind's Order of BC on August 7 — the Canada Revenue Agency registered an $11,996,763 judgment against the Eclipse-related corporate entities. KingSett would later allege, in subsequent court filings, that $7.5 million in GST collected on a related Thind project, Highline at Metrotown, had been misappropriated — diverted from the trust accounts it was meant to be held in. The court-appointed monitor, KSV Restructuring, would later state on the record that the alleged misuse of those funds was never substantiated; the allegation and the rebuttal now sit side by side in the public CCAA file. By the end of 2023, the company's senior secured lender was preparing for the worst.

The 2023-cohort of Eclipse presale buyers did not know any of this. Several of them, in particular, continued to sign contracts in the back half of 2023 and into 2024, after the CRA judgment was already on the public registry. Among them was a thirty-year-old barber in Burnaby named Mohammadjavad Nadali.

IVMohammadjavad Nadali, $40 a haircut, four years

Nadali charges $40 a haircut. He had spent nearly four years saving the $38,295 he used as the down payment on a one-bedroom at Eclipse in 2023. In an affidavit filed in BC Supreme Court he put his position simply:

He did not know, when he signed, that the CRA had registered a judgment three months earlier. He did not know about the alleged GST misappropriation. He did not know — because nothing in his disclosure statement told him — that the developer was negotiating with KingSett over multi-site defaults. He did not know that, fifteen months later, the project would enter creditor protection.

What he did know was that the tower he had bought into would, the marketing said, complete in 2026.

Today Nadali's tower stands at 95 percent completion in Brentwood. The crane is up. The building has an occupancy permit. He is one of more than three dozen buyers who have asked the BC Supreme Court — through two coordinated petition groups, with letters to the KSV monitor sent in December 2025 and February 2026 — to declare their contracts unenforceable on the grounds that the developer failed to disclose material facts.

The court-appointed monitor, KSV Restructuring Inc., has characterized the petitions as an end-run around the federal Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act. In its own filings, KSV concedes that the Eclipse presale purchasers agreed to pay "substantially above what could be achieved for the same units in the current market," but argues that allowing them to back out "would encourage further challenges to closings by other pre-sale purchasers, resulting in additional value erosion" — and warns that "the impact on the debtors and their creditors ... will be severe."

KingSett's loan-and-portfolio-management director, Daniel Pollack, has filed an affidavit pointing to "uncertainty in the economy and particularly in the real estate market" as the underlying cause of Thind's tax problems and mortgage defaults.

The market position can be measured against Daljit Thind's own words. In an affidavit sworn in 2024 about a different Thind project — Surrey's District Northwest — he said he did "not believe the deposits for the pre-sold units are at risk as they were sold at a price that is below current market value." The market has, in the time since, caught up to him: enough District Northwest pre-sale customers eventually rescinded their contracts to scuttle a planned sale of that project out of receivership.

VMurrayville House, 2018 — the precedent that defines the law

The law that decides Nadali's case was written eight years ago, on a different stalled project, fifty kilometres east. In October 2017, a 92-unit condominium development in Langley called Murrayville House entered receivership. Its developer, 0981478 B.C. Ltd., owed money to a mortgagee named Forjay Management Ltd., which moved to have the receiver disclaim the presale contracts of forty buyers — buyers who had paid deposits at 2014–2016 prices and stood to take possession at completion if the project had finished as planned.

The case was heard by Madam Justice Shelley Fitzpatrick in the BC Supreme Court. Her decision, Forjay Management Ltd. v. 0981478 B.C. Ltd., 2018 BCSC 527, is the controlling authority on what happens to BC presale buyers when their developer goes under.

The decision turned on a single clause that appears in essentially every BC presale contract:

That clause, the Court found, defines the buyer's place in the priority queue when a project enters receivership: the buyer is an unsecured contractual creditor, not the owner of an interest in real property. The mortgagee — in Murrayville's case, Forjay; in Eclipse's case, KingSett — has legal priority. The receiver may therefore disclaim the presale contracts, return the buyer's deposit with interest, remarket the units at current value, and use the proceeds to pay down the senior lender's secured debt.

Justice Fitzpatrick acknowledged the human stakes directly:

She then ruled against them. The Murrayville buyers received deposits returned with interest, plus a right of first refusal to repurchase their units at the new (substantially higher) market price. Most did not exercise the right.

The Forjay framework has since been applied in the District Northwest receivership — another Thind property — in early 2025, where KSV Restructuring used it explicitly to disclaim presale contracts and offer the same deposit-return-with-ROFR resolution to a much larger pool of buyers.

For most of the Eclipse buyers, this is the outcome the monitor's lawyers will argue for. It is also, on the bare numbers, not the worst possible result: deposit back, interest, an option to repurchase if the market value supports it. The losses are the lost time, the lost capital appreciation, and, for buyers like Nadali, the loss of the actual home they thought they had bought.

VIREDMA section 16 — the door that may still be open

The Eclipse plaintiffs are not relying solely on Forjay. They have built their case on a different statute: the Real Estate Development Marketing Act, SBC 2004, c. 41. Section 16 of REDMA imposes a continuing disclosure obligation on developers. If a developer becomes aware that its disclosure statement does not comply with the Act, or contains a misrepresentation, it is required to immediately file an amendment with the Superintendent and, within a reasonable time, deliver the amendment to each purchaser whose title has not yet completed.

A "material fact" under REDMA is defined to include (a) "a fact, or a proposal to do something, that affects, or could reasonably be expected to affect, the value, price, or use of the development unit or development property"; (b) "the identity of the developer"; and — directly relevant to Eclipse — (c) "the appointment, in respect of the developer, of a receiver, liquidator or trustee in bankruptcy." A "misrepresentation" includes both false statements and omissions of material facts.

The leading BC case applying section 16's amendment-and-delivery framework is Woo v. Onni Ioco Road Five LP, decided by the BC Court of Appeal in 2014. Woo established the test for post-closing rescission under REDMA section 21(3): the undisclosed fact must be objectively material and adversely affect the purchaser. On the facts of Woo itself, the Court of Appeal rejected the purchasers' rescission claim — the undisclosed facts in that case did not meet the materiality-plus-adverse-effect threshold. Woo is, in other words, both the doctrinal framework the Eclipse plaintiffs must work through and a reminder that BC courts have set a high bar for what counts.

The Eclipse plaintiffs' theory is straightforward. A CRA judgment of nearly twelve million dollars against a developer's affiliated entities is a material fact. A KingSett allegation of seven and a half million dollars in misappropriated GST is a material fact. The eventual appointment of a receiver is a material fact under REDMA's own definition. Each of these existed at the time Nadali and others signed their contracts. None was disclosed in an amendment delivered to the buyers under section 16. If the Court accepts that the developer was aware of these facts and failed to amend, the contracts are voidable. The deposits do not go back through the receiver's general priority queue; they were never enforceable contracts in the first place.

This is a substantially better outcome for buyers than the Forjay route. It is also a hard case to win, because it requires the Court to find both that the facts were material and that the developer was aware of them at the relevant time — and Woo demonstrates the Court is willing to reject rescission claims that don't clear that bar. The monitor will fight on both fronts.

VIIThe frustration door, by contrast, is closed

For BC presale buyers who are simply unhappy with the price decline, BC law leaves essentially no exit. The doctrine of frustration of contract in BC requires that performance be impossible — not merely uneconomic, not merely painful, not merely a substantial loss. The BC Real Estate Association's legal-update materials are unusually direct on this: "Mere financial hardship, market decline, or even substantial price drops between contract signing and completion do not constitute frustration of a presale contract."

I have searched the BC court record for any presale-purchaser frustration case successfully argued since 2020. I have not found one. A buyer who locked in at $900,000 in 2022 and is now being asked to close at $720,000 of market value has no frustration claim. The doctrine does not reach a price decline, however severe.

The other narrow doors — the seven-day rescission period under REDMA s. 21, the negotiated assignment sale to a third party, the defaulted-and-forfeited deposit — are all available, but each is more constrained than most public commentary suggests. The seven-day window has expired for any 2021–2023-era buyer. The assignment market for distressed BC presales has collapsed; what assignment sales still close typically do so at 25–30 percent below original presale price (data from current distressed projects at Chloé and similar). The defaulted-deposit exit is clean only if the buyer's specific contract does not give the developer the right to sue for damages above the deposit if the unit later resells at a loss; some BC contracts give exactly that right. Read your contract before you walk.

VIIIThe bigger graveyard

The Eclipse case will set the precedent. The list of stranded buyers waiting for the precedent is large.

Across Thind's portfolio, District Northwest in Surrey (a 1,023-unit project) entered receivership in November 2024; its presale rescissions have already exceeded the Shareholder Agreement cap, and the BM Group stalking-horse $86-million bid was terminated in May 2025. Highline at Metrotown and Minoru Square in Richmond entered receivership in December 2024 — Highline alone carried a $74.9-million KingSett balance as of November 2025. Anthem Properties replaced Rennie as the sales agent on Highline. Townline was retained to run the redesign of Minoru Square.

Outside the Thind portfolio, The Curv — a 60-storey downtown Vancouver tower from Brivia Group — had Deloitte Restructuring appointed receiver on July 25, 2025; the project never broke ground, against $91.2 million owed to a syndicate led by RBC. Chloé, a 46-unit Kerrisdale building by Matchpoint Development / Lightstone, entered receivership in February 2026 — 31 units presold, only 22 closed, $77.3 million in secured debt and another $1.5 million unsecured. The Met in Port Coquitlam was sold under court-supervised receivership to NorthStar Development — agreement signed September 2024, court-approved at $11.6 million in November 2024; it will relaunch as "Livy PoCo" for 2028 completion. Ardea, a 204-unit Wesgroup project at Vancouver's River District, was cancelled outright in September 2025.

Each carries its own group of stranded presale buyers. Each will look to whatever the BC Supreme Court does with the Eclipse petitions for its template.

IXWhat an assignment-holder can actually do

If you hold a BC presale assignment in distress today, the practical options are narrower than most coverage suggests:

1. If your project is in formal receivership or CCAA: the Forjay framework controls. The most likely outcome is deposit back with interest and a right of first refusal at the new market price. If the new market price is below the original contract price, take the deposit and walk; if it is genuinely affordable at today's value, the ROFR is worth a serious look. Your money is not gone.
2. If your project is not in formal receivership but you suspect material non-disclosure: the REDMA section 16 path is open. The cost of building a Woo-style case is real — months to years of litigation, real legal fees, no guarantee of success. The upside is that a successful REDMA challenge voids the contract from the start, rather than just letting the receiver disclaim it. Engage a real-estate-litigation lawyer with insolvency experience before you do anything else.
3. If your project is solvent and you just want out because prices fell: BC law does not provide an exit on those grounds. Your options are negotiated walkaway (developer's discretion), assignment sale (likely at a substantial loss), or default and forfeit. Read your contract carefully — and have a lawyer read it — before defaulting, because some BC presale contracts give the developer the right to sue for damages above the deposit if the unit later resells at a loss.
4. The seven-day rescission period under REDMA s. 21 is the cleanest exit ever offered to a BC presale buyer. It has long since expired for any contract signed before mid-2024.
5. One closing reminder: under BCFSA's trust-account rules, your deposit was supposed to have been held in a notary's, lawyer's, or brokerage's trust account — not the developer's. If your deposit was held properly, it is not part of the bankruptcy estate; it is recoverable to you, even from an insolvent developer.

XThe precedent that's coming

Justice Fitzpatrick's words from 2018 about the Murrayville buyers — "there are no winners in these circumstances" — apply equally to Nadali and the other Eclipse petitioners. They will not, regardless of the outcome, get the home they thought they were buying. The realistic best-case is that the BC Supreme Court accepts the REDMA section 16 theory, voids their contracts in full, and orders the developer's estate to return their deposits without their having to wait in line behind the senior lender.

What the Eclipse decision will determine is what every other stranded BC presale buyer — and every BC developer who knew about an emerging insolvency problem at the time they were still signing contracts — can expect for the rest of this decade.

For Nadali, who put down $38,295 in 2023, the case will decide whether his deposit is recoverable from a notary's trust account or, more likely under the Forjay framework, is recoverable from the receiver, with interest, paired with a right of first refusal at a price he probably cannot afford on a barber's wages in 2026.

His tower is up. His crane is still up. His occupancy permit is dated April 10, 2026.

The hearing he has been waiting for has not yet happened.

This piece pairs with the four-year contour line: same story, from outside the courtroom.