Anyone wish to comment re their experience with s*monds?

Now i have a contract date 22 Aug, and start reading the sample contract... really have no idea at all... i think i would spend a whole month to read this sample contract..
Not sure if anything that i need to be aware of?
and am thinking to get my solicator to have a look once getting the final one

if i remember correctly, when we signed our contract with simonds, we were told it's a standard contract by HIA.

We however negotiated to have progress payments time frame increased to a minimum of 10 days, instead of the normal 5 days. not sure if this is an alternative.
We also changed the penalty fees for delayed start and end of construction.

you will be able to change a few things to suit your needs but they will tell u the contract is standard.

As far as i know, all standard windows have locks. although im not sure how good these locks are. but i can tell that the windows we got from simonds all have locks.

as for other inclusions, we only now realised that we should have added in our contract that the rangehood to be ducted to the outside instead of the roof.

Thanks thesunchaser

Yeah i am also thinking to have the rangehood air ducting outside, still waiting for the quote from them, can i ask how much did they charge you for that?

Hi all,

Great site! Been lurking around for a little while now. Thought I'll contribute now, as I'm well into building my house with S*monds. I'm building the Villa Grande 48. Just completed frame stage. So far, so good.
As for having the rangehood air ducting outside, S*monds is charging me $242.

Cheers,

Fuzzy

Sorry, have no idea what material they will be using. My aunty is building with another builder at the moment, and they were quote around the same price, so hopefully S*monds aren't using cheap stuff.

hey, i thought i would post a reply in here.. my mum built a simonds homes in regional victoria 12 months ago and she is absoutly wrapped in the simonds journey.. we built the mansfield i dont think they build it anymore but its a 28 livin home, 38 s under roof federation style home.. it took them a while to get going preparting the contract etc, but once it started it went straight up and the building supervisor was great, was very helpful etc..
the house was finished with perfection the few little things that we didnt like the finish on was fixed before we moved it, and after hand over the maintance guy was there in a flash with any little issues that needed to be fixed.

im 20 years old and have just signed up myself to build a small simonds home, and have just signed my contract and things cant have gone better so far so good.. so im not sure mabe there alot bette in the country lol..

Simonds started our house on the 23/12 according to the site start letter we received yesterday. So, the contracted end is 11/09/2009, though I certainly hope we get in sooner.

However, we didn't even know they had started! We went out to the site to put the Simonds sign up after the finance was approved to find a nicely flattened piece of land. I was somewhat hoping that some other builder had done it by mistake (wrong lot) and we'd get a refund. No such luck!

Unfortunately, we live about 50kms away from where we're building and in completely the opposite direction, so we can't "nip past" on the way home. I've now scheduled a weekly visit to the site each Saturday, as that's about the only way I can keep up.

BTW, to those of you who used MySimonds -- how often (if ever) do they update the progress pictures?

Yeah, I've been getting those as well. Thanks claego.