The Summary tells what Next did. This page tells how Next obtained, or tried to obtain, my signatures and my payments. Whether that is a crime is examined elsewhere; here the facts stand on their own.

Three times Next wanted my signature. Three times I had the right to say “no”, as anyone has with a contract or a waiver. And three times the answer to my “no” was not an argument, not a lower price, not a court. It was taking something of mine and holding it. The three episodes, most recent first.

July 2026: the waiver, or the stairs

On September 30, 2025, Next announced to the owners that it would install an access-control system on the elevators to collect the debts it claimed from them. It turned on the system on July 1, 2026. Since then the elevators stop at my floor only for holders of a chip, and the chips come from Next. On July 3, Saba Tsiskaradze, the manager, put the price of a chip in writing: "You can receive elevator chips any time you sign the Act of handover". The act looks like a one-page receipt, but its last clause has both parties "confirm that it contains no ambiguous provisions and they have no claims against each other". Sign it and every claim I hold against Next Hospitality, starting with the grievances I sent in February 2026 and which it has never addressed, is gone.

I asked for that clause to be removed. Next refused. On August 17 the director, Levan Otarishvili, restated the condition as the building's rules. My request of August 18 for chips without conditions has not been answered. Nino Kikava, the other manager, set the same condition in person at the meeting of July 1, received the record of it and Saba's corrections, and had nothing to add.

So the elevators I co-own, in a building where I own two apartments on the sixteenth floor, are held until I waive my claims. On July 4 I came home with heat exhaustion and had to plead with reception to be let up. Until I left Georgia on July 9, my wife and I carried our water up to the sixteenth floor. Couriers and visitors cannot reach our door. It has been 91 days, and my chips are where they were on July 3: behind the waiver.

January 2026: the agreements, or the “regulations”

On January 27, 2026, Saba wrote that he had to prepare "a management and service contract, which you will need to sign". I answered that a contract I need to sign is coercion. His reply denied it and repeated it in the same breath: "we are not forcing you […] the same two agreements must be prepared in your name and signed by you. This is not coercion - it is simply compliance with the existing regulations". The next day he sent the two documents, "a requirement under the current regulations, as the building has an aparthotel status", and an hour later called them "a contract requested from residents of apart-hotel buildings due to existing regulations in the country". One of the two, the management agreement, gives Next 40% of rental income for apartments I bought and renovated. Within the same hour, Saba charged me $608 under the other contract I had not signed, "a matter of regulatory compliance".

A week later Next's lawyer, Gvantsa Lomadze, said the same: Next is "required by applicable regulations to have such agreements in place with all unit owners". The signature was "a mandatory condition applicable to all unit owners", an obligation that "arises from the nature and legal status of the complex itself" (message). When she finally answered in writing, on July 7, the obligations turned out to be the developer's own, undertaken before the authorities. In nineteen months, the only regulation anyone at Next has ever named to me is the apart-hotel status of the complex. It binds the developer. It does not bind me.

This time the thing held was not the elevator, it was my peace of mind. A manager and a lawyer told a foreigner, in writing, that he was out of step with the regulations of the country, and that signing would put him right. Which regulations, neither said. The unease was the point, and the signature was the exit. Next's own specialist had explained why the signature was wanted months before: "every owner signs, because now you have to pay, so there has to be a basis for it". They needed a basis for the bill. They knew they didn't have one. The signature was to be the basis.

February 2025: payment, or no renovation

The pattern was set a year earlier, before my renovation could begin, by Lolita Samnidze. Next's price for letting my materials into the freight elevator, for the paperwork of meters already installed, and for waste disposal my wife had declined, was GEL 8,105.98 and a signature.

The condition on the meters was said plainly: "you won't be able to use it until you settle the outstanding amount". The condition on the elevator was put as a choice: "If you think you won't make it in time, then pay the amount for bringing up materials later, and start the renovation after the tourist season ends". Pay now, or wait eight months. When my wife asked for the concessions Lola had made in chat to be written into the contract, the answer was: "As for the contract, unfortunately nothing will change; if it suits you, sign it". I signed and paid the same day. The lift was then unlocked by reception, on the instruction "say that you've paid" (message).

My wife said the terms suited us. Of course she did: by then, the alternative was no meters and no renovation. Whether a deal is free is decided before the “yes”, by what the other side is holding. Here they were holding my meters, my co-owned elevators and my undertakings with the renovation team I hired. Luckily the paper I signed was merely transactional, and I have never signed anything else of theirs.

What this is

A trade is when each side brings something of its own to the table. Next brought my elevator, my meters, and my peace of mind, and offered to give them back for signatures and payments. That is not a trade. It is not a hard bargain either. It is a hold-up, conducted politely, with 🙏🏼 emojis.

I have never refused to pay for what I received. In March 2026, with no contract and no obligation to Next, I paid it GEL 2,170 in good faith for the months it had billed, after proposing to its lawyer that I pay against a receipt. What I refuse is to sign what I never agreed to, and to owe Next a debt that belongs, if it exists at all, among the owners of the building, through their association, and not to a company that appointed itself to collect it.

The debt Next enforces since July was never agreed. The regulations Next cited were never named. The waiver Next demands is a waiver of my right to complain about all of the above. Each time, the thing I was asked to sign was the thing that would have made the previous step legitimate after the fact; that is how Next's contracts are written. Other owners in the building were made the same offer, and some have said what it cost them.

Who did it

Not one employee on a bad day. A manager in 2025; a manager, another manager and a lawyer in 2026; then the director, who called the lockout a security measure, and the reception, which applies it daily. The system was announced nine months before it was switched on. It is not a mistake. It is how the company does business.

Next does not take “no” for an answer. They take the elevators.