What many builders do is offer a low, low price to prospective clients. This is their ‘base price’ and they say you just need to add on what you want from here on. But do you want a driveway, flooring and eaves?

 

Of course you do. Just as you want a building design that will pass council requirements and BASIX regulations, and building foundations that will keep your home solid. The truth is everyone wants these things because they are in fact necessary – no home can actually be built for a base price.

 

At Rawson we include everything up front. We include everything you actually need to build your house in our Rawson Real Price. That’s it. It’s that simple. No base price deals or gimmicks. No tricks. Just honest business practice – the way it should be.

 

A tender is an offer to carry out work at a stated price. That price includes an estimation of how much the work will cost. What many builders do is offer a low tender price that will only go up. That’s because they don’t do a full site investigation before tendering.

 

Instead, they give you a tender price full of ‘allowances’ (for example piering, service connections and BASIX) that won’t be finalised until the council approval stage or during the build. The result is that your final price will be more, much more, than the tender price.

 

At Rawson, we only give you a tender price after we do a full site inspection. That means that we know the dimensions of your block and how much fall is on it and the location of your trees and your services. When we get to the contract stage, we’ve also typically submitted your plans to council, too. Our tender price is our final price because at Rawson, we have really done our homework.

 

Signing the building contract is the point at which each party is legally bound – they’re contractually obliged to meet their side of the agreement. What many builders do is ask you to sign a contract very swiftly. Once you accept their tender, they’ll produce preliminary drawings within a few weeks – and then ask you to sign a contract.

 

And, because many other builders won’t have inspected your site fully or obtained council approval at this stage, you’re signing a contract peppered with provisional sums and allowances… which just really allows the price to be hiked up, up, up.

 

With Rawson, we ask you to sign a contract much, much later in the process. At the tender request stage, we do a full site investigation which then allows us to present a tender with fixed prices for the entire build.

 

Once you agree to the tender we then submit plans to council and typically ask you to complete your colour and materials selections. It’s only when we’re well on the way towards council approval – knowing the extent of any council-requested contract.

 

What all this preparation really means is that the tender price is the contract price. As long as you meet your side of the agreement in the  allocated timeframes – then the contract price is the final price; what we like to call the Rawson Real Price.