Porter Davis homes

Hi everyone. a bit over a week ago we told our bc to go ahead with the build and she said she sent the go ahead to those who deal with the permits. How long should it take until I get a build date?
Our dead-line for site start is end of April and I'm afraid we might be pushed to May.

Can someone share how long it took for them and if anyone knows if we will be charged for delays since the delays were not our fault?

Our land settled end of September and we were ready to go. There were delays with council and developer approval after that as well as delays waiting for PD on queries etc. We were charged $1000 per month after that for not starting on time (We booked a Sep site start with our sales consultant back in Feb 2016 which was a stab in the dark) so yes you can get charged for delays, possibly. Feel free to read my blog for more on our timeline.

OMG it took you 7 weeks to get council approval??? omggg
hope our council wont be making any problems for us... 7 weeks is allot!

Yes I called the council before lodging and they said it would be up to 60 days to get the approval. Seems pretty standard in that area.

Ive just been back over our emails, and our council approval took 12 week
From final approval to permit it actually took another 4 weeks. We then received our site start letter a few days later for a site start 23/8 ( 2-3 weeks after permit) I think work still only commenced a week of so later.
Nothing about that timeframe is fast

So we’ve had our tender appointment now. It went fairly smoothly, there were a few things that we wanted to add in or take out following our WoS visit, and during the appointment the presenter brought up a lot of stuff that we hadn’t really thought about in too much detail. Disappointingly even though we had told our BC to get quotes from Kitchen Culture on some cabinetry that we had discussed at WoS but hadn’t confirmed this hadn’t been done, sounds like the fault was with Kitchen Culture rather than the BC at least. We’ve been assured that this will all be in place by the time we get to contract.

We also discovered a few differences in our plans from the display home where we had thought something was standard but in fact it was not, doors, the size of windows etc. Happily we got all this sorted on the day with a few exceptions which got cleared up in the next couple of days.

We’re now up to about $95k over the original list price of the house. $20k in (estimated) site costs, $17k in structural options like a study, extra linen cupboard etc, $23k in promotions including kitchen, flooring, Hebel etc, about $6k in electrical, $4k in Estate covenant stuff, $6k in upgraded carpets, another $5k or so in cabinetry, tiling, bathrooms, $6k to get air con, $7k for BAL. It all adds up, and our sub $200k house is now pretty close to the $300k mark. After that I’m guesstimating that there will be another $3-4k for fencing, up to $5k for blinds, $5k for landscaping and $3k for concreting the driveway. It’d be nice to think we can get some of those costs down a bit but it seems likely we’re going to hit that $300k mark, and that’s before buying furniture, TV’s and all the rest of it.

Under the number of days it should detail what's included, ours says weekends, public holidays, rdo's etc

Ours says calendar days, nothing about weekends, public holidays etc.

Which is really good! It says 98 days actual build days.

I'm hoping once we get to council approval that doesn't take us to long! Anyone here had to deal with Cardinia Council??