How to Choose a Renovation Builder in Brisbane

Most advice on choosing a builder is a list of adjectives: look for someone experienced, reliable, communicative. True, and useless, because every builder's website claims all three.

What is actually useful is the set of things you can verify before you sign, most of which are set by Queensland law and none of which depend on trusting anybody. That is what this covers.

Start with the licence, and check it yourself

The QBCC maintains a public licensee register. It is free, and you can search it by name or licence number.

Do it yourself rather than accepting a number on a website. Three things to look at:

• Does the licence class cover your work? Licences are scoped. A licence that covers one trade does not cover a full renovation with structural work.
• Is the licensed entity the one signing your contract? This is the check people skip. A licensed individual and an unlicensed company with a similar name are not the same legal entity, and your contract is with whoever signs it.
• What does the history show? The register shows licence history, which is more informative than a current status alone.

For the record, our licence is QBCC 15332765, held by All Hands On Pty Ltd. Look it up.

The contract is not a formality

In Queensland, domestic building work priced over $3,300 including labour, materials and GST requires a written contract. That threshold is low enough that it captures essentially every renovation.

Contracts come in two levels:

Any renovation worth calling a renovation is a Level 2 contract, which carries the fuller set of consumer protections. If someone proposes to run a $60,000 bathroom and kitchen job on a handshake and an invoice, they are not offering you a discount — they are removing your protections and their obligations at the same time.

What you can be asked to pay up front

Deposits are capped, and the caps are not negotiable:

• Level 1 contracts ($3,301 to $19,999) — maximum deposit 10% of the contract price.
• Level 2 contracts ($20,000 and over) — maximum deposit 5% of the contract price.

There is one exception. A deposit of up to 20% is allowed in limited circumstances where substantial customised building work or prefabrication is performed away from the building site and that work represents more than 50% of the total contract price. That is aimed at things like fully manufactured joinery packages, not at a builder who wants more cash.

Beyond the deposit, payments should be tied to defined stages of the work. If you are being asked to pay ahead of the work rather than behind it, ask why.

You have five business days to change your mind

Queensland gives you a cooling-off period on a domestic building contract, and it is worth knowing exactly how it runs.

The period is five business days. It begins the day after you receive a signed copy of the entire contract, including any plans and specifications — and for contracts valued at $20,000 or more, a copy of the QBCC Consumer Building Guide. If the contractor is slow to give you those documents, the window within which you can withdraw is extended rather than shortened.

To withdraw, you give the contractor a written and signed notice. You then have to pay the contractor $100, plus any out-of-pocket expenses they reasonably incurred before you withdrew.

There are exclusions. The right does not apply where you had a previous contract with substantially similar terms for the same work, or where you received formal legal advice about the contract from a practising lawyer before signing.

The practical point: the clock only starts when you have the whole document. A contract handed over with the specifications "to follow" is not a complete contract, and you should not treat it as one.

The insurance you are already paying for

Most residential building work in Queensland valued at more than $3,300 — including materials, labour and GST — must be covered by the Queensland Home Warranty Scheme.

The mechanics matter. The licensed contractor collects the premium and pays it to the QBCC on your behalf, and the cost sits inside your contract price. So you are paying for it either way. What you should do is confirm that the policy has actually been taken out for your job, because the money leaving your account and the premium reaching the QBCC are two different events.

Variations are where budgets die

Every renovation of any size has variations. Something behind a wall is not what anyone expected, or you change your mind about the tiling. That is normal. What separates a well-run job from a bad one is entirely procedural.

Queensland's rules on this are specific. Before the variation work starts, the contractor must give you the variation in writing. It has to state the change to the contract price — or the method for calculating it — and, where the price changes, when the increase is payable or the decrease credited. You then respond in writing to say whether you agree. The one exception is urgent work where producing the written variation first is not reasonably practicable.

Read that again as a consumer protection, because that is what it is. A builder who says "we'll sort it out at the end" is proposing to price the work after you have lost the ability to say no. The correct answer to a mid-job change is a piece of paper with a number on it, before anyone starts.

Questions worth asking at the site visit

Once the verifiable things check out, the differences between builders show up in how they answer these:

• Who will actually be on site, and who do I call? One point of contact, or a different supervisor each fortnight.
• What have you assumed in this price, and what have you excluded? Vague answers here become variations later.
• What did you look at that I did not? Drainage, subfloor, roof space, the age of the services, access for materials. A builder who priced your job from a walk-through of the finished rooms has priced a guess.
• What is the program, and what could move it? Long-lead items and approvals are the usual culprits. Someone who names them up front is someone who has thought about your job.
• What happens when you find something unexpected? You want to hear a process, not a reassurance.

Signals worth taking seriously

• A deposit above the legal cap.
• Pressure to sign today, or a price that expires this week.
• No written scope — just a total.
• Reluctance to put a variation in writing.
• A cash discount for skipping the paperwork. The paperwork is your warranty insurance, your contract and your cooling-off period.

None of these are matters of taste. They are the difference between a contract you can rely on and a dispute you cannot win.