spalen

Looking at some of these major builders like Golden Edge or Adenbrooke Homes people like that... they have pre-designed homes that you buy and they turn up to build them on your block.

Has anyone any experience of negotiating with these guys for discounts or extras?.

Wanted to know if anyone has had any success before going into bat.

Teliko21

Extras? We added some extras to ours and then took em out and told the builders to leave those items for us to sort out when we moved in due to the huge markup Ours even suggested we sort it out ourselves because their prices were ridiculous. eg We have having solid wooden doors stained (not painted). The builder was charging between 100-300 dollars more depending on the door than we could do ourselves so our house is coming minus any internal doors My suggestion would be to add whatever extras you want and then investigate privately how much you could get them installed yourself before you sign the contract.

As for discounts, the only discounts we got were for things we took out eg windows, concrete under the verandah etc.

Good luck!

sassie

We found with our builders that all the fittings and fixtures that came with the house as standard were so very basic that we took them all out of the contract and provided our own, and they gave us a rebate accordingly.

Had a little run in with them on the installation of our rangehood though. In the contract it says owner supplied items will be installed as per standard items deleted. Any extra charges will be borne by the owner. They swore blind that we would have to pay the full installation cost, until we pointed it out to them in the contract. They said they would send a variation invoice out to us for the extra cost, but nothing has turned up. Think they were a little embarrassed so hopefully the fee has been waived.