Rawson - new build questions

Hi all - new to these forums, we are planning with Rawson in Sydney's south east for a knockdown and rebuild and have some beginner questions if anyone has had any experience with them. Some of these are generic questions and not applicable to just Rawson's.

1. We are under a flight path and wondering if double brick or single brick with insulation will be better for noise reduction? Also what type of insulation is best for ceiling and walls?

2. We heard a acoustic report has to be done with the council as well costing $5k+, has anyone had experience with this?

3. Rawson has a 8 step process before the build actually begins including paying $1200 upfront after finger in the air estimate to do a tender. But when we asked deeper the fixed price tender is only fixed price up to a point and its not until stage 6 when you do interior home selection which will change the overall price again.

Is it not possible to go full detailed specs on all rooms, fixtures etc up front? If I'm paying $1200 for a quote I want it to be fixed price period not contingent of further details to be tabled later and another fee & price hikes down the road.

4. Also have you guys received any tangible output to you after the tender stage from these volume builders? It mentions site inspection reports and contour reports etc, do they give that you?

Tender stage will confirm site costs and for the most part all things related to the structure and exterior finishes.
Interior selections have no impact to the tender process as they state the inclusions are based on the standard selections. Thereafter you get variations for the interior selections with this and that across five or six spreadsheets.
That finalises the payment schedule and the file gets released to construction.

1. I'm almost certain that Rawson will not build in double brick. The insulation in the ceilings (under the roof) and external walls is thermal insulation (not acoustic) and required in order to pass the BASIX requirements. We had acoustic insulation added between the upper storey floor joists and to some of the internal walls.

3. The $1200 fee includes the cost of getting the contour survey and a soil classification report so they can fix the site costs for the tender. Rawson won't deviate from their process, but what you can do is include as many upgrades as you can into your tender. For instance we had staircase, window, door and caesarstone upgrades (just to mention a few) included in our tender request. The salesperson is under pressure to get you to sign up and pay the $1200, but don't be rushed, get as many of your changes/upgrades identified and included in the tender request as you can.

4. You can get copies of the contour survey and the soil classification report but you may have to ask for them. With the contour survey, they'll only give you a pdf copy which is not quite as useful as the dwg (AutoCAD) version that Rawson have, but apparently it's "against Rawson policy" for them to send that to you. Quite ridiculous of course, you've paid for the contour survey and all it contains is information about your own property... however they're completely inflexible about this.

Thanks everyone for the feedback so far.

robw17 what type of acoustic insulation would you recommend? I want as much noise reduction as possible given the flight path noises.

The sales consultant at Rawson seems to think they can build double brick but we haven't progressed further to the tender stage yet so this may change when it goes back to the head office.

We specified R3.0 soundscreen for between the upper storey floor joists and R2.0 soundscreen for six of the internal walls (just for where we wanted to cut down on noise from adjacent rooms, i.e from TV's, laundry, bathrooms). The higher the R rating the better the sound attenuation.

The cost was fairly reasonable. The R3.0 soundscreen for between the upper storey floor joists cost us $2,260 (for a 38square size house) and the R2.0 soundscreen for the six internal walls cost a total of $780.