Land Settlement to start of construction - timeframes?

Hey everyone...

I was just wondering what people's experiences are with the time frame between settling on a new block of land and starting construction. It's hard when your renting, because you have to pay rent and the mortgage on the land at the same time...I'm currently facing the prospect of having to do this for 6 months or so before construction even starts and I wondered if this was a bit extreme??

Basically, this is going to be the decider for me whether I go ahead with building or not...

So... can people tell me what sort of time frames they experienced??

mine was about 3 weeks

When we bought our block of land (or very sticky mud as it is at the moment) there were perhaps three other blocks in our development in South Morang still unsold. It has been about six months since we purchased the land, and work started on site about a week ago.

Now, the reason why I mentioned that almost all the other blocks have been sold is that there are some houses completed with people having moved in, but about half the sites still have no building activity on them. Given our experience, this indicates to us that many builders are happy to hook people in, knowing that they can, in most cases, string people along until they are really ready to sign the contract.

As other people have written on this forum, if you are after a fast start, actively have more than one building company preparing a contract for you. The extra cost is minimal, and you are not being held over a barrel by them knowing that starting again with another company from the beginning is not an option for people in your situation.

Good luck!

I know for us, our land settled on the 4th of May and we signed our building contract 1st of June. We are now almost mid August and there is no site start due to issues with council approval so all sorts of things can effect your site start.

Like you we are renting. We are paying now the mortgage for our land and today received the rates bill and also received other small bills for the property such as water. Once each progress payment is made our mortgage payments also increase and I can tell you from now it will be hard but I know for us when we move in we will be spending less so it is a good learning curve!

Hi Piper... our land settled mid dec but we didnt sign up to a builder till early feb and we had site start mid may! Our neighbours settled same day as us and had sit scrape before christmas! If you find a builder while your waiting for land settlement and start the ball rolling it is alot quicker like in our neighbours case!

Our land settled end of May. (Land was already titled).

Building Contract signed start of June.

Site Start is today (which is about 2 or 3 weeks late)

Bank approval for construction was the catch for us, took 2 months...

Mine only took 5 days
Land settled on 25Sep, and site cut on 30Sep..