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Start with the Fast-Track Assessment
Four questions, about a minute. It tells us what kind of review your contract needs, and it tells you whether it still needs one.
02
The whole of your leverage sits in the days before you sign
A building contract is not a formality at the end of choosing a builder. It is the only document that will decide what happens on every bad day of the next twelve months, and there is exactly one moment when you can still change it.
Before you sign
A proposal
Every clause is something being asked of you. A term you will not accept can be struck out, capped or replaced, and it costs a conversation. Builders amend contracts routinely. They just do not offer to.
After you sign
The law between you
The same clause is now binding, and changing it needs your builder to agree to something they have already won. The venue stops being the kitchen table and starts being QCAT or the QBCC.
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What the review covers
Five passes over one document, and a written list of recommendations at the end of them.
The particulars
The starting point, and the part most people skim. We check the particularised information is correct and matches what you actually agreed: that the deposit is within the cap the QBCC Act sets, who carries the cost of obtaining building approvals, the anticipated start date, the rate of liquidated damages, and whether the payment schedule is proportionate rather than front loaded with large sums early and very little left at the end.
Deposit cap, approvals, start date, liquidated damages, payment schedule
The general conditions
The clauses that decide what happens on every ordinary day of the build, and on the bad ones. We read them in full and tell you how each one operates in practice rather than what it says on its face. The eight questions we answer are set out in the next section.
Clauses 4 to 19, read in full
Extenuating circumstances
The situations the contract is least likely to have explained to you, and the ones with the most money attached. What happens if your builder goes into liquidation partway through, what a liquidator can claim from you for work already done, and what you are entitled to if the contract ends early or the work comes back defective.
Insolvency, termination, defective work
Your specific concerns
Special conditions and annexures are where a standard form contract stops being standard, and they are drafted by the builder's side. If there is a clause that has been worrying you, or a term the builder has added and asked you not to worry about, bring it to us by name and we will answer it directly.
Annexures, amendments, anything a builder has asked you to accept
What comes back to you
A written list of recommendations against your contract, not a summary of it. Proposed amendments where a clause should be changed, the terms worth pushing back on and the ones that are ordinary, and the points to raise with your builder before you sign. That list is the deliverable, and it is what you take into the conversation.
A marked contract and the amendments to put to your builder
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The eight questions we answer about the general conditions
These are the clauses the build actually runs on. Our analysis of them covers, without limitation:
(a)
When works are to be commenced, and what happens if there is a delay in commencement
(b)
What clauses increase or decrease the contract price, and how each clause operates
(c)
How variations may arise, and your rights in response to a variation request
(d)
How extensions of time arise, and your rights in response to an extension request
(e)
What happens if the builder breaches the contract
(f)
What happens if a dispute arises
(g)
The practical completion process, and what you are agreeing to when you sign it off
(h)
Any special conditions that are incorporated into the contract
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And the four that have nothing to do with the building work
Extenuating circumstances. The parts of the contract nobody expects to need, which are reliably the parts with the most money attached.
(a)
Your builder goes into liquidation
Partway through a build, with your deposit and progress payments already made and the site half finished. What the contract lets you do next is decided before you sign it, not after.
(b)
A liquidator makes a claim on you
For works performed or materials purchased by the builder before the collapse. Whether that claim reaches you at all depends on how the contract handles title in materials and payment on account.
(c)
You need to terminate
Your options and rights if you end the contract, and what is payable by whom when you do. Terminating without the right to do it is itself a breach, which is the expensive way to learn this clause.
(d)
The works are defective
What the contract gives you on top of the statutory warranties, how the defects liability period interacts with them, and what you have to do to preserve the claim.
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Why Odyssey Legal
The reviewer is the litigator
The same practice runs building and construction disputes through QCAT, the QBCC and adjudication. The clauses in your contract are read by people who have had to argue them afterwards, which is a different reading from a first pass by someone who never will.
A marked contract, not a letter about it
You get the amendments to ask for, in writing, against the clause numbers in your own document. Something you can send to your builder rather than something you have to translate first.
Queensland contracts, Queensland law
Master Builders, HIA and QBCC residential forms, read against the QBCC Act, the schedule 1B requirements and the statutory warranties that apply here and nowhere else.
Quoted before anything starts
The scope and the cost of the review are put to you in writing before any work begins, so the review never becomes its own surprise.
Fast-Track Assessment
Send us the contract before you send it back
Four questions, about a minute. It tells us what kind of review your contract needs, and it tells you whether it still needs one.
If you are on a deadline from your builder, say so in the last question. Or email info@odysseylegal.com.au with the contract attached, or call (07) 5370 8759 if you would rather talk it through first.
Related information
Building and construction disputes
Where this page stops. QBCC, QCAT, adjudication and the BIF Act deadlines
