No action to recover damages for any injury to real or personal property, for personal injury or death arising out of any deficiency in the design, planning, supervision, inspection, and observation of construction, or construction, of an improvement to real property, nor any action for contribution or indemnity for damages sustained on account of such injury or death, may be brought against any person performing or furnishing the design, planning, supervision, inspection, and observation of construction, or construction, of such an improvement more than ten years after substantial completion of such construction. The date of substantial completion shall be determined by the date when construction is sufficiently completed so that the owner or his representative can occupy or use the improvement for the use it was intended.
S.D. Codified Laws § 15-2A-3
Time for bringing action--Date of substantial completion
Applied in 7 court decisions — leading case Gades v. Meyer Modernizing Co. (2015)
Most recently applied in Hoven v. Banner Associates, Inc. (July 2023)
Source: SL 1985, ch 156, § 3.
How often courts cite this section
Court decisions citing this, by year. The dip in the last several years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so recent citations are undercounted.
Official source: South Dakota Legislature. Reproduced from public-domain South Dakota statutes; confirm against the official source for the current text. Not legal advice.