Guides
Plain answers to the questions people ask before they sign anything. 20 guides, nothing gated, nothing you have to give us an email address to read.
Choosing a builder
Who you sign with matters more than anything else on this list.
- How to check a builder’s licence, in every state
You can do this yourself in about five minutes. Almost nobody does, because almost nobody knows which register to search. Here is…
- How to check a builder is still trading
A licence register tells you a builder is allowed to build. It does not tell you they can afford to finish. Those are different…
- Twelve questions to ask a builder
Ask all twelve. The answers matter, and so does how readily they come.
- Project builder or custom builder
This is usually framed as a budget decision. More often it is decided by the block, and getting it the wrong way round is expensive.
- How to compare two building quotes
The cheaper quote is often the one with less in it. That is not dishonesty — it is a different set of assumptions, and until you…
- What a display home price does not include
A display home is built to be the best version of itself. The advertised price is usually for a different, plainer house on a block…
What it costs
Where the number comes from, and which parts of it are not fixed.
- What it actually costs to build a house
We are not going to give you a per-square-metre figure, and you should be suspicious of anyone who does.
- What site costs actually are
Site costs are the single most common reason a build ends up over budget, and the single most common reason two quotes are not…
- Provisional sums and prime cost items
These are the two lines in a building contract that are not prices. They are estimates, and the contract usually says what happens…
- Variations: why a fixed price changes
Almost every build has variations. The question is not whether you will have them, it is whether you find out before the work is…
- Progress payments: what you pay and when
The principle is simple and worth holding on to: you should never be significantly ahead of the builder. Money paid for work not yet…
The contract
The document that decides what happens when something goes wrong.
- What's in a building contract
A residential building contract is mostly standard. The parts that are not standard are the parts that matter.
- Fixed price or cost plus: which contract
Most people want a fixed price. Fewer people know how much of a fixed-price contract is not actually fixed.
Your block
What the land itself does to the price, the design and the approval.
- BAL ratings explained
If your block is in a mapped bushfire-prone area, a BAL rating is not a formality at the end. It is a design input, and it is priced…
- Soil classification and what it does to your slab
The most expensive part of a house that nobody looks at is underneath it. Site classification is why two identical houses on the…
- Registered and unregistered land
If you are buying in a new estate, the single most important date in your project is one your builder does not control and the…
- Knockdown rebuild or renovate
This decision is usually made on feel and then justified with numbers. It is worth doing in the other order.
The build itself
What happens after you sign, and how long each part of it takes.
- How long a build takes, stage by stage
We are not going to give you a number of weeks. We will give you the sequence, and tell you which parts slip.
- The stages of a build
Knowing the sequence is what lets you tell a normal quiet week from a problem. Most of a build looks like nothing is happening, and…
- Owner builder: what it actually involves
People become owner-builders to save money. Some do. The ones who do not usually underestimated the same three things.
Rather have someone do the checking?
Reading this yourself is genuinely the right call, and you can. If you would rather not, that is the job we do — free to you, because the builder pays.
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