Well eight weeks have come and gone and as expected but still somewhat disappointing the settlement of our block of land is further delayed.
There are some small matters which the developer needs to attend to for council approval and then we need to wait for land titles to be completed. This means that we will probably not start within the Rawson Homes tender period we were given and probably won’t have settled until early next year, which will have been nearly 18 months since we sold our unit and put our deposit on our land. That will have been 14 months longer than we’d originally been told the land would be settled by the developer.
Looking on the bright side though we’ve been saving money like crazy and we’ve almost got pre-approval from the bank now for the land and home to prepare for that settlement date which could spring up at any time.
We received a variation for our site costs from Rawson a couple of weeks ago and we’ve come in a fairly significant sum under the original estimation. We’ve got rid of the 500mm step down in the garage which is great! We’ve gotten rid of the step down in the middle of the slab which means the ground floor is all one level which is also good, we didn’t mind either way. We’ve only got drop edge beams on one side of the house rather than the entire perimeter which is very good but the price is more than twice the estimation of drop edge beams around the entire perimeter which I always though was far too low for what was on the original plans. More budget now for electrical and internals!
We’re still waiting on Rawson to send our updated siting and plans, hopefully this happens soon so we can get things rolling with the council which is going to take forever!
Anyway we hope this post explains the lack of updates, there really hasn’t been anything to post about for the past 8 weeks!
Hi guys, great blog and website.
We’re looking at building a Chifley 37 as well and in the planning stages. Just had our tender presentation and one thing we are struggling with is the date you need to start building by for the house to be covered by the fixed price contract. After the initial term, they start charging you for every month delay. This seems to be the issue you identify above.
We are looking at a new estate that won’t be ready for at least another 12 months. How did you guys address this in your build contract? Did you just accept the risk and additional cost if it did go over? Seems unfair that you have to pay extra for a delay that is out of your control (estate developer overrun). Trying to figure out if we execute build contract now, wait until next year or look at other builders.
Thanks.
Hey Liam I like your taste in houses! The monthly contract cost is a fact of life when building a new home and you end up going over the tender period. Rawson are actually better than Mojo who we initially went with who actually charge you a percentage of your final tender price per a month. 1.5% of a $500,000 build is $7,500 a month to keep your tender valid, I know a few people who paid tens of thousands of dollars to keep their tender only for a couple of months. Plus builders revise their costs pretty regularly, some designs went up by +20% in 18 months.
We were in a similar position and if you really want the current promotion on offer just tell Rawson your land isn’t looking at settling for some time and they should accommodate you, we delayed our tender presentation a month as that is when the clock starts ticking, plus we got our tender validity extended to 9 months. We’re still paying the monthly fee at the moment but if we were to start again the current price of the same house may have gone up and we’d need to start the whole process again and we’d lose our promotion we like.
We always recommend Hennie at he Kellyville sales office, hes been at Rawson a long time and is good at working the system to help his customers.