Provincial Homes

Hi, we are doing a KRB with Provincial in Hornsby council. Building the Woollhara, just signed the commencement fee, waiting on final plans to review. Would love to hear from anyone who is going through a build with them currently and what your experience has been so far? Any advice to make the process more smooth would be greatly appreciated.

We have previously build with provincal and have friends who are currently building. They told me its has been slow due to covid and the weather.

Our experience is similiar to the people who have posted both positive and negatives. Highly recommend you read all 34 pages in this thread.

Fireant's advice applies regardless of which builder you go with.
A couple of other things to be aware of are if you are bush fire prone or flood prone as this will add additional costs and building requirements to your build which are generally outside the scope of a builder to know at the early stages. Our build is neither so no additional costs from those applied, although we did choose to do gutter guards (which provide ember protection and reduce leaf fuel buildup) as we live in a leafy suburb.

Storm water: Provincial have their own storm water engineers who did all of this assessment and design work. I do agree you should do your homework yourself as well but we found what Provincial came up with to be required, reasonable, and wasn't too much additional (we were on the high side of the street and no easement access required, etc so it was basically the tank under the driveway requirements where the cost came in). The sales team had also pre-warned us this was one of the biggest variables before and after the first tender signing.

Basix is an additional cost found with every builder. There are standard requirements such as rainwater tanks, etc.

Studio: If you are unprepared the studio appointment could set you back +++$$$, however Provincial did provide us a huge suite of brochures with a lot of the products early on so we came up with an included and upgraded option for each thing and got the studio consultant to price out the 'upgraded' versions for us with our preferred 'included' option as the fallback. We chose to upgrade some things and not others during the studio consultation based on seeing the physical products and/or cost. Eg we upgraded the internal doors and some of the tap fittings, and we preferred a more expensive caesarstone throughout the house.
Same applies to the tiles. Go to the tile showroom and have a look at the builders range for the house you are building before your tile appointment. This will give you the baseline from which to consider if you want to upgrade. We went as soon as we had signed the tender to browse ourselves and set our expectations of what was available in the range. The tile consultation is the last consultation as styles, etc can run out of stock and it is separate from your studio consultation.


Electrical: look on the Clipsal website. Figure out what you need now vs what may be more effective to do later on after the build. Our Clipsal consultant was really good at telling us what could easily be added or changed after vs what was necessary at the build stage. Think about your lighting needs and try and negotiate some additional lights into your build contract if you have the opportunity. Remember all show homes have way more lights than a regular house would ever want or need so walk through the home and figure out where you would strategically place lights, whether you'd go for downlights or not, and count how many you realistically think you need and potential costs involved. Think about putting in basic lighting in some places and replacing with feature lights after the build; we've been told it will work out cheaper if we buy our own feature lights and get an electrician in to install them in one hit afterwards.

Bricks: Provincial gave us the option of 2 brick companies (one was Austral) and there was a wide selection in a number of shades. We ended up finding something we loved out of the builders range and didn't pay anything additional for the bricks. We also chose to remove the render from the final façade as I hate render which also brought the cost down slightly. When you do bricks you'll also be choosing roofing, gutters, window frames, etc. Again, you can go and look at the selections yourself before your consultation so you know what to expect and can pre-decide on whether you want to look at the additional cost for the fancier bricks. For us, when we put our favourite from the builders range up against our favourite from the Metallix range we actually preferred the one from the builders range - go figure!

I agree that you should expect the price after your first tender to go up a bit once the proper site inspections, etc are done as there are site specific numbers they don't know until just before you sign the final contract when they have all their plans finalised and detailed site surveys for the new design.

I'll also add we met someone recently who built with Provincial 20 years ago and are still in the home they built. I asked them if they had any regrets and their response was "not at all, best decision they ever made and that the house is still as good as new 20 years on unlike others from other builders on their street of the same vintage". Amazingly they even had one of the same sales guys as we did! This was reassuring to us as when you do read back through threads for every builder you see a lot of complaints and negatives. I think that's because people always want to speak up when things go wrong but rarely speak up when things go right. I can assure you whichever way things go with our build we'll comment so others know what our experience is like.
We also watched a Provincial build (Woollahra 44) go up in the next suburb over from us when we were in the deciding/early tender process and we were impressed with what we saw and the quality of the build.

Good luck with your build!

You should always to get everything priced prior to signing the tender (because its cheaper) but since you have signed the tender it makes absolutely no difference. Just get all your changes done prior to contract signing.

\