We had our pre-start yesterday after few hiccups, the day went like this
The pre-start was meant to be at 9:30 a.m., we were at European ceramics changing our tiles and laminex at 9:00 in the morning, we finished the selections but the lady wanted to charge us $50 for the changes as apparently thats standard if you do any change after the intitial selection.
I was told by someone if you tell them "its because of the cost builder is charging" they will waive off the fee and indeed she agreed, although our new selections costed (if its a word) us more than what we initially selected but she didn't say anything. phew
After the selection we bolted down the freeway to SPH office, we were late by 10 mins but we did notified them so it was all good.
We got there and into it straight away, we made few changes here and there and she said she will drop all that into costings by the time we had lunch it was all back. Then we went through our upgrade selections and geez they know how to suck money out of you, so we upgraded 90% of the things. Then we came to my favourite electrical upgrades....i had it all marked so she just copied my notes on her plan. So far it was going very good.
Eventually we got down to the costings.....so we found out that we have overdone our budget by $5000, so we did cut down few things but what was most annoying was their calculation for tiling (we had mosaic border for our 3 showers) and porcelin tile for our kitchen. So i worked it out in front of the the pre-start lady and there was an error for 150% ( i.e. they charged us 250% of what they should have charged us), she wasn't happy that i could calculate their "complex calculations" and to be honest understand it better than their costing guys. At this point the environment was getting a bit too hot and i could tell they didn't like being told the right costs and that they charge too much. If you can imagine she was running to the sales manager, costing drafting etc etc to try and explain it to me that their calculation were right.
She kept saying this is what we charge blah blah, untill i told her i work as an XYZ, finally she got the costing lady for us, the costing lady calculated in front of me and calculated it wrong again although this time she wanted to charge me less than what we should have been charged but eventually she understood the "complex calculations" and indeed she agreed. The excuse she came up with was a joke she said "we thought you wanted to have them in a vertical way". I wanted to say it her " the area still doesnt change" haha but anyway i didn't
So now we could feel the environment was getting better, and then the pre-start lady went through other things and she said we never knew I work as XYZ, and i said to her so does that mean an average person gets penalised just because they dont understand the costings, her response was "unfortuanely that the way it works" and i was like "are you serious" wtf?? As we were going through things she said we cant have the roof tiles we selected as they are an upgrade option. I told her the sales rep told me from day1 it was standard. and here we go again she runs to sales manager, drafting etc etc
Long story short ==> apparently its costing them $4k (sales manager), $5.5K (costing), and $7K (pre-start lady). i was amazed how they had 3 different figurs for the same thing, it made them look stupid when they were standing in the room together. ( they all gave these figures one by one when they came in into room) haha
Unfortunately the sales girl is on leave so we dont find out about the tiles for another week. So we need to wait
All in all a good day and its good that we all agreed to same conclusions, apart from roof tiles
All these incidents make me wonder how accruately i got charged for other things?? What is everyone else opinion on this??
Cooper32
A great tip we had was to move the man hole into the garage as tradies etc won't need to go into your home to get into roof space (& they always have dirty finger marks on them!!! )
We did this, thanks a ton for the advice
Regards