The HIA contract is heavily biased towards the builder. I would strongly advise that you get legal advice as the contract provides very little protection for the buyer. In particular I recommend getting advice on the dispute clauses.

I agree with you there re the contracts. It is interesting, you have a cooling off period unless you get legal advice then you don’t. Given all the palava the ACCC goes through with the AUSTRALIAN consumer guarantee etc, there is sod all protection against unscrupulous builders in a market where peo...

Queensland is waging a campaign to ensure that subbies are paid and unscrupulous builders don’t just run up a series of unpaid bills with their tradesmen and then vapourise, which is great and well worthwhile. The otherside of the coin, as you say Save H2O, is the consumer that gets stuck because a ...

Alright kks I will bite..what do you mean? There is some form of external agency that arbitrates contract disputes in most jurisdictions.

I have a good solicitor who is dealing with it now, but gee it is frustrating. It is about 6 weeks away from being finished.. I suspect this guy has done it before because he got a flogging in the Bunnings carpark at the very beginning of our contract (not us I hasten to add!) -he said it was becaus...

Yes. I reckon his issue is cost management not poor quoting. There is still over 150k in the loan to go but he isn’t interested. The interesting thing is the figures he put into a spreadsheet to “prove” to me where the monies already paid went. He has just under 23k for the use of his vehicle and tr...

Yes that was our response. If I didn’t have the emails I wouldn’t believe it myself! He has managed the problem by not doing any work on the job since the end of Jan, so I guess as far as he is concerned it is all cool!

The HIA contract is terrible

Building inspector, congrats on starting the thread. I have a house under construction - or in theory under construction - as the builder has stopped work because I won’t pay him a couple of hundred thousand (yes a couple of hundred thousand) more than the fixed price contract we signed. I don’t thi...

The HIA contract is totally one sided and NOT in favour of the consumer. I signed a “standard” HIA fixed price contract last year and it is the biggest mistake of my life. The builder has you by the short ones and if you get to the point where you need to terminate because they are doing the wrong t...