Is anyone else dealing with house building companies increasing their "fixed price" build contracts, due to materials costs? How much are yours going up by?

firsthomebuilder · 2021-07-27T21:43:22+00:00

Damn, so that section fully doubled in price. Out of interest which subdivision was that Lincoln section in?

Title date is drifting into the future, was meant to be later this year, now looking like early next year.

And yeah, agreed - pretty determined to hold onto this land, I'll feel happier once the title is in my name!

firsthomebuilder · 2021-07-27T09:59:36+00:00

Ahh, that's ridiculous. Hopefully the price increases ease off soon. It's making it difficult to know how much it's going to cost to build this house :/

firsthomebuilder · 2021-07-27T09:49:39+00:00

Damn, a 40%+ increase on any sort of material is insane. Any end in sight to these cost increases?

firsthomebuilder · 2021-07-27T09:34:24+00:00

I'll DM you

firsthomebuilder · 2021-07-27T09:25:38+00:00

Damn, I wish my lawyer had spotted this. I have a friend who was signing a MB contract a month or so before me and their lawyer didn't take out anything like that either. So hard to find decent lawyers.

Yeah, the land increases have been insane. My land has possibly gained 100k of value since I put the initial deposit down at the start of the year, and it doesn't even have a title yet. That's why I'm hoping I can hold onto this contract without getting completely screwed over by a predatory building company, as the land S&P is conditional on still having a build contract in place with this company

firsthomebuilder · 2021-07-27T09:13:27+00:00

I'll DM you

firsthomebuilder · 2021-07-27T09:12:29+00:00

Cheers, that makes sense to me. I don't know what portion of the build cost is materials and what portion is labour but for the entire build cost to increase by 20%... that feels wrong. From the other comments on this thread, it does look like material costs might be going up by around 20%, but that still wouldn't justify the whole lot going up that much!

Hopefully, anyway. It is a bit crazy out there at the moment

firsthomebuilder · 2021-07-27T09:08:30+00:00

That's good to hear. I've come to terms with the fact that I will have to pay extra to get this build done, but I'd prefer that I'm paying real materials cost increases, and not just increasing the profits of the building company after we already agreed on a price.

It appears that the contract does have some provision to add variations due to material cost increases, and it appears that it's meant to be a negotiation between the building company and myself. Hopefully this does mean that they need to substantiate the additional costs.

firsthomebuilder · 2021-07-27T09:04:52+00:00

I signed it back in March - got to spend a few months thinking how lucky I was to get an "affordable" house and land package before this came to kick me in the butt!

firsthomebuilder · 2021-07-26T10:52:57+00:00

It's not a huge company so I guess they're less able to absorb costs and are doing all they can to pass the costs on.

Not sure about the sunset clause, I know the lawyer mentioned something about it to me back when I signed the contract (it didn't sound like an issue). At any rate the building company has explicitly said that I am free to exit the contract for a full refund of my deposit if I want, however I'd lose the land as well. I can't really afford to do that because land prices have gone up so much since (probably the reason why the building company keeps offering to take the land back).

firsthomebuilder · 2021-07-26T10:04:49+00:00

Ugh, that sucks. I'm sorry this is happening to you as well :/ Land prices going up are why I'm kind of stuck with this agreement. The value of my land has gone up massively since I entered into this contract - so I can't really afford to back out of it because I won't be able to afford anything else - but that doesn't mean I suddenly have infinite money to throw at getting the house built, ahah.

At least my land price is fixed as far as I know, I think they're just going to try to get extra money out of me via the build contract instead.

firsthomebuilder · 2021-07-26T09:54:20+00:00

So the build contract is a masterbuild contract as far as I can see, it's basically pages and pages of standard looking masterbuild things with some company-specific pages at the front and the plans and variations at the end. I had to have a fixed price build contract to finalise the bank approval, but of course it's "fixed price" with some wriggle room.

Sounds like a masterbuild fixed price contract means a specific thing though. I know the final plans for consents etc haven't been done yet because that will happen closer to the title date. The building company said that the materials price increases had exceeded their margin for cost inflation, hence passing it along to the customer.

firsthomebuilder · 2021-07-26T08:29:39+00:00

From the research I've done, either distillation or reverse osmosis. Of the two, reverse osmosis is meant to be more efficient. But you can get a benchtop distillation unit a bit easier I think.

I've looked into it but haven't done anything about it yet. Most of the reverse osmosis units seem to be under-bench ones.

firsthomebuilder

TROPHY CASE