Chris
Hi Aaron, By saying you’d be interested to see a breakdown of payment schedules from builders other than the one you’re dealing with do you mean you want other people to find these, and post them on line here (hardly practical), or publish them somewhere? That’s really asking other people to do it for you.
Actually if you want these schedules you could first try looking at some of the standard forms of contract, such as the Registered Master Builders (RMB) form, which breaks payment down into about 15 – 20 stages, each between 2 and 10% of the total contract price, plus a number of other items for extras not part of the actual house. That’s reasonably fair, but as I’ve discussed with my builder I think that both you and the builder can agree to adjust these a bit (increase the number of stages, or the % in each) to more accurately reflect the actual way things will be done on Site. For example he packaged some items where one was done early in the build, and another done much later. So I could have withheld all the payment until the latest one was completed. But I agreed to pay part of the stage earlier.
I think in the RMB contract it’s just payment of a stage on substantial completion. I guess your builder has had problems with that in the past, so he has chosen to make it more favourable to him. But doesn’t sound too unreasonable to me.