Tender Deposit

We're building with PD and have our tender next week. We've been asked to bring around 6k for a deposit, the balance of 5% will be paid on signing the contract. Our broker, who's been great, has told us that there's no legal requirement for us to pay any money until we sign the contract and should not pay anything until then.

How has everyone else fared in this situation?

Henley didn't ask any payment at tender, however ~5% deposit must be pay at contract stage according to HIA. May be PD want to lock you up with the deal?

Mirvac have given us prelim tender for $0 (which is not very itemised) but want $4k deposit to move forward any further towards full tender.

Sorry, correction: We paid Henley 1.6k at tender and the remain of 5% at contract

We paid PD 3% at tender and 2% at contract. AFAIK, they are the only builder who asks for a large deposit at tender. We had our tender last March and we did not go throught their mortgage broker. Not sure if the terms have changed since.

That's what we have to pay next week when we do our tender. I understand that there's a requirement to pay 5% deposit when we sign the contract, but not sure why we're required to pay so much at tender, considering we haven't signed anything. We've paid $1,000 so far and can't see why we should pay anything more until we sign the contract. I wonder what would happen if we refused to pay

I paid $500 for contour survey and intial tender. When I was happy with the tender I then paid $2000 for plans to be drawn up and submitted to council (this fee included the $1200 council fees). No further payments were required until after the slab was poured and that was 15% of total contract price.

We also paid 3% at tender and were told that after paying and signing the agreed tender, we could still pull out but would lose roughly $2000 which is the cost of getting the drawings made up.

we paid $1k initial and only 1.5k at contract signing with PD. That's just because we used there broker. They wanted 5% of our building cost paid if we didn't use there broker.

We didn't pay anything at tender, thanks to a problem with funds being temporarily tied up because of a technical hitch at the time. It was no big deal to PD, who gave us a copy of the tender, just not a copy of the specific plans. We then paid our whatever-percent about two weeks before the contract appointment and the balance of the 5% on signing of the contract.

I think it probably depends on the individual staff you deal with. There's quite a bit of work that goes into siting the house on your land, including all the variations you require, ordering the 5-star thingummy and so on, so they're probably within their rights to ask for a payment up front. There's legislation that governs how much they can keep if you pull out, so you're pretty well covered.

Bottom line is, if you don't want to pay, then don't - but don't be surprised if they won't play nice either.