Unexpected costs almost always come from two places: a contract full of guesses, and site costs nobody checked before pricing. Reliability problems almost always come from a third: a builder running more jobs than they can personally stand behind. Check those three things properly and you have removed most of the risk before you sign anything.
The good news is that all three are checkable, and none of the checks require any building knowledge. They just require asking five specific questions and paying close attention to how each one is answered. Take these to every builder on your shortlist, including us.
1. Does the contract have any allowances, provisional sums or prime costs in it? Every one of those is a guessed figure that can rise after you sign, and the risk of the rise sits with you. Ask the builder to show you each one and explain what happens if the real cost comes in higher. A genuine fixed price has few or none of them. A contract full of them is an estimate wearing a nicer name, no matter what the cover page says.
2. How many homes do they build at once, and will you deal with the owner or be handed around? The same trades cannot be in two places at the same time. A builder with too many simultaneous jobs hands clients from person to person, and the finish and the timeline slip with every handover. Ask for the number, and ask who specifically will answer your calls during the build. A builder who caps their workload can tell you both instantly.
3. How fast do they answer when you have a question? Communication during the build is where reliability lives or dies. Ask what their response time is and how you will get updates. Then run your own quiet test: notice how quickly and how clearly they respond to you right now, while they are still trying to win your business. It will never be better than this. If they are slow before the contract, believe what that tells you.
4. Have they done a contour survey and a soil test, so the site cost is a real figure and not a guess? The ground is where budgets blow out fastest. Slope, soil type and soil removal can move a price by tens of thousands of dollars, and none of it is visible walking the block. A builder who has tested and surveyed before pricing can give you a real site cost. A builder who has not will reach for a provisional sum, and you will meet the real number after you sign.
5. Can they show you, in writing, exactly what you will pay if you change nothing? This is the question that ties the others together. A prepared builder can hand you a single figure and stand behind it, because the work behind it has been done. Get it in writing, and keep it.
Across all five, the pattern to watch for is the same. Vague answers are the warning sign. Reassurance is not information. “Do not worry, we will sort that out” is precisely the sentence that precedes a variation. Specific answers, given quickly and in writing, mean the builder did the hard work up front, and doing the hard work up front is the entire foundation of a proper fixed price and a reliable build.
One last thing worth doing: ask to speak to a past client, ideally one whose build hit a problem. Every build has challenges. What you want to know is how the builder behaved when one arrived.
If you want to see how we answer these five questions ourselves, call Toby on 0483 943 309 and ask him all five, straight down the list. We wrote them, and we are happy to be tested on them.
Link back to the epic post: What “Fixed Price” Really Means in a Building Contract.
