Hi
I have my practical completion inspection booked this week, and just after some advice re payments.

My understanding is that after this inspection I will be issued an invoice for the final payment, I can then arrange payment during the ten day period that the builder has to fix any final defects.

Is it standard practice to arrange this payment, knowing that there are still a few things to be fixed? Or would you wait until the house is 100% complete before submitting your payment approval to the bank. That seems to run the risk of delaying handover, given that the bank will take a week or so to approve and transfer the payment.

Any advice appreciated, I don't want to delay it, but also don't want to have made final payment, only to find that the builder hasn't finished everything as agreed.

Thanks

This is something I'm concerned about also. We're not at PCI stage yet, but we'll be there in about a month.

The concern, of course, is that once people have your money, they're always a lot less motivated to get the work done. I'd be interested to hear from others who have already been through this stage, and how they handled it. I wouldn't want to delay handover either, but so many people stop caring once they've got your money.

they'll probably try and push as much as possible to be fixed post-handover during the 3mth warranty.

anyone know legally what they can and cant force us to wait for to be fixed?

Submit the paperwork to the bank, but have the payment in the form of a bank cheque, that you give to the builder at handover when you get the keys

Good advice .. we did that but we still came unstuck as we didn't see all the defects until we were living in the house and started cleaning things - there really is too much to check at handover. A lot of things (almost all) were put onto the 3 month maintenance list - even the jobs that were going to be done ASAP didn't happen - took 7 weeks for the tiler to come and this week the gutters will be fixed (3 months since handover) and then everything else will be fixed apparently on 15th December - seems an awful lot to be done in one day in my mind. Having an inspector at PCI is a must!

That is very true - we moved in end of September 2010, had our 3 month inspection March 2011, and all our maintenance items were finally finished in October 2011 (we also picked up a bunch of stuff whilst living there, and also added things that our SS refused to put on the PCI list - as they were "standard" - but have since been fixed)

Very good advice! I will check with the bank if this is doable. Sounds like a good solution.