Web & Brown-Neaves contract

Hey janeyS
Welcome to the forum
If the largest Builder in Perth whose Home projects feed their brick manufacturing plant with their projects is telling their clients
To Find their own bricklayers BGC Company WA
What chance do you think you'll have with WBN fixing your build costs, when BGC can't?
BTW they both rely on the same Lump sum Contracts which aren't fixed
(Start here)
Do you even know how many bricks are in your Build let alone what brickies are demanding?
Next question are you going to settle for a cheaper inexperienced team that doesn't even know what they are doing on your $1m+ build.
How are you going to deal with non compliance and structural defects (end up here)
There are many more questions you'll need answers for, unfortunately the salesman job is to "Bring in Deals, you'll need to pay for the experts once you're locked in... search the forum for price gouging, ignore any builds finalised pre-covid
Cheers
Chris

Wow thanks for the replies. Will read up on price gouging. Might be time just to forget and buy established. The house is brick both levels, so not a good start.

I'm just about to start my build in Perth (~$1m) but I've gone with Stannard Homes. Steered clear of all the project builders, even the more "premium" ones like WBN. Stannard are a smaller, private/family owned business, been around for 50+ years, debt free, have their own trade teams and only take imited number of concurrent builds to fit their trade teams. Obviously they face the same cost pressures for materials and labour, as well as supply issues, as no builder is immune, but thus far have been great. We'll see how we go, fingers crossed!

Thanks Wyldey, I'll have a look at Standard. Would other builders such as Atrium, Shelford and Riverstone fit in the smaller custom builder category?

Thanks for the info here, just curious wyldey would these comments re:Perth Builders also hold true down South in Bussleton/Dunsborough?

We've started planning with DAH, but after we started with a Bondi plan at $380K and made some modifications & added cabinetry we are closer to $530K, then looked a pre-PreStart to get some idea of finishes and now can add another $45K...

Really starting to wonder how much it should cost to build ~280m2 on one level with a good level of finish?

I’m building with Riverstone (2 storey, ~1M) and have had a great experience so far. No price rise with the contract I signed last November. Slab was poured in April and the second storey bricks are about to be laid. They only do about 30 homes a year. I would check them out.

Hi tamamontu

I'm probably still too early in my build to really comment. Our slab has been down 12 weeks now and this fortnight's update suggests we'll have brickies starting in 2 weeks. Stannard's comms have been good thus far - they told us up front wait would be approx 10 weeks for brickies and last few fortnightly updates have seen that pushed back a little but compared to other experiences you read out there, wer'e still going ok. If you're a stickler for detail, you'll probably get frustrated with the rather generic communications you'll get from builders, you just have to learn to go with the flow a bit.

We're retaining the pool shell but had the old apron demo'd and it'll receive a birthday after the build. We bought our own temporary fencing off gumtree/FB marketplace to put around it as it's MUCH cheaper than hiring it and you can probably sell it for about what you paid for it years later. Retaining the shed at the back has also, so far, not been an issue. We do regularly pop past site as it's pretty much on the commute from where we're living to work and will be visiting more as the weather gets warmer to water our established fruit trees. No materials have really been put on the back six odd metres of our block so that area, which we're largely hoping to retain, has gone unaffected (other than a new soakwell or two).

My only tips would be to take your time prior to signing build contracts and try and front end as many changes as you can before moving to construction. Once you enter construction, you start getting variation charges each time you decide you want to change something. We spend a lot of time going through our plans room by room, thinking about how we thought we'd live in each space, where we'd want power points, which wall we'd want taps on, where we'd put furniture, any built in cabintry etc. We visited a lot of displays and took lots of pictures of things we liked. Couldn't afford all of them so prioritised and compromised. I'd like to think that we won't have too many/any changes once we see the build come to life but you never know!

Hope that helps, good luck in your build journey.

Thanks wyldey, StructuralBIMGuy for your replies and sharing the information.

I dont want to hijack original thread of JaneyS.