Our construction has been delayed for about one year. According to contract $50 per day, the builder should pay us $18,000 delay fees by cheque on handover date. On the same day, we would pay final payment of around $30,000 to them by cheque as well.
But the builder sent a variation list to us yesterday and deducted our delay fees to only $3,000 by adding on a lot of variations which he never told us before.
He knows we want to urgently move in as we have cost of over $200 per day including interest and rental. And the delay fees counting has been concluded on 30/5 when his certifier came for final inspection (he said it was the practical completion date).
Whom we should seek advice from? If that is possible for us to move in first without handing over and discuss about delay fees later on?
We do don’t want to accept the $3000 delay fees as that’s really unreasonable and we suffered big loss on the delay already.