building contract help

what does your contract say
probably $xxx subject to soil test etc

You should have checked off all the engineering properly before you signed the contract here's why
1.Post contract come back for extra $s to clients can be huge for engineering. ie ( it's known as Building contract gouging)
2.The builders pricing and margins are always more competitive before you sign or hand over a deposit for the preparation of plans ( Always make sure the plans and ENGINEERING are properly Prepared)
3. In 2 above if he knows there's a possibility the client will walk away.. they will sharpen their quoting pencil
4.If the engineering and costings had been independently Scrutinised before 2 & 3 Above such anomalies would have been brought to your attention
5. Post contract engineering variations need to be re-certified and plans re-submitted to the Council
6.How do you know it's compliant-> non compliance needs to be checked and Certified by an Engineer and Building Surveyor
7.There's also the problem of substitution, poor workmanship, unqualified trades completing the work,etc,etc and no one the wiser

Yes it's possible and allowed as builders and others make mistakes on PSs..It's funny how they favour them (hugely) financially after the clients has handed over a deposit or signed the contract
As to What to do? -> see 5 and 6 above and then pay up or look into cancelling the contract, either way the building contract doesn't favour the home builder-> talk to a lawyer

LOL, Builders can only charge an extra $100 on a door handle upgrade, as you have pointed out they can make $50K on the engineering (see other posts on homeone).
Cheers
Chris

I am new to this forum, hope I’m posting in the right place. I have signed a building contract with a volume home builder and am waiting to commence building. There is a provisional sum in my tender for traffic control as it’s a busy road. The builder has recently submitted a variation which is very open-ended and almost certainly will exceed the provisional amount substantially based on their estimate.

As an example, they are stating $285/hr travel allowance each way for the traffic controllers who they have said are located around an hour away from my site. (I am based in metro Sydney, not a remote area.) The builder estimates I will need 25-30 call outs in total so that is over $14k alone just to pay 2 traffic controllers to travel to site, never mind doing any traffic control. Its not like there aren’t any RMS-accredited local traffic control companies but the builder said I can’t choose another traffic control company. How much of a right do I have to dispute the variation which I haven’t signed, if I believe the variation costs are not in any way considered reasonable? If I got quotes from an equally accredited service provider, can I make them use the provider (and they just add on their margin)? I don’t want any trouble with the builder or bog down the process but I just can’t accept paying extra tens of thousands above provisional sum for essentially no reason. Any advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks, will look to start a new post.

The only thing they have said was that the company was RMS accredited, but so are local companies which aren’t hard to find. They have been very vague with responses regarding this variation and not surprisingly, they normally always respond by email except regarding this.

A new thread would have been good but this thread title is ok and your concerns have a better chance of being seen by the forum's professionals in General Discussion plus it will remain longer at the top of the page. The Building A New House sub forum is intended for building blog type threads.

Thanks I will check particularly the right to see invoices for provisional sums. FYI the builder is charging over $1100 per min 4hr visit plus an additional $200-odd for signage/traffic board per visit.