Reviewing the tenders properly, understanding what each has and hasn't allowed for, negotiating with the preferred builder.
The price came back and it is a long way over. You have already spent real money to arrive at this number, the drawings are finished, and the immediate feeling is that the project is dead. That feeling is very common at this exact point and it is usually wrong.
Most tenders that come back over are recoverable. What decides it is the order you do things in. There are about seven levers available and they do wildly different amounts of damage to the house you were going to get — and people almost always reach for the wrong one first, because the easiest lines to see on a page are the fee, the good windows and the site involvement. Those three are small, and cutting the last one costs you money later rather than saving it.
Before any of it: have the prices read properly. A price is not a number. It is a scope with a number attached. The gap between three tenders on identical documents is frequently wider than the entire fee that produced them, and until somebody has read the exclusions line by line you do not yet know what you are over by.
Sometimes the honest answer is that the brief was always bigger than the budget, and that is on me.
The CAA sets this out precisely: assess the tenders, negotiate with the preferred tenderer to obtain an acceptable offer, report and recommend. The lowest price is frequently not the lowest cost, and reading a tender properly is a technical skill.
Wanting someone in your corner. The client is about to hand a large sum to a stranger for two years. Having a professional whose only interest is the client's interest is worth the fee on this step alone.
The lowest number wins. Exclusions and provisional sums are not read. The gap between the quoted price and the final cost is discovered progressively over the following year, in monthly instalments.
The lowest price is frequently not the lowest cost, and reading a tender properly is a technical skill. I go through each one for what has been excluded, what has been carried as a provisional sum, and what has quietly been assumed. Then I negotiate with the preferred builder and give you a written recommendation. You are about to hand a large sum to a stranger for a year or more. Having someone in the room whose only interest is yours tends to pay for itself here.
Don't cut anything for a week. First get all the prices into the same format and read the exclusions, because a chunk of the overrun is often scope one builder carried and another didn't. Then work out which kind of problem you have. A scope problem, where the design grew. A market problem, where builders are full and pricing to stay full. Or a documentation problem, where risk got priced in because the drawings left questions open. Each has a different fix, and cutting finishes solves none of them. Then, and only then, start on the levers.
In rough order of value returned per unit of damage: reduce floor area and roof area, because square metres are the biggest single lever you have. Simplify the form — fewer corners, fewer roof planes, fewer level changes. Keep wet areas where they are and stack plumbing. Simplify the structure and avoid long spans and heavy steel. Then substitute finishes and fittings, which is the cheapest cut to reverse later. Then stage the work. Then renegotiate. Deleting documentation or site involvement is not on that list, because it does not reduce cost — it defers it into variations.
An allowance for work that cannot be priced exactly yet — underpinning, rewiring an old house, a retaining wall whose depth nobody knows. It gets adjusted up or down against actual cost when the work happens, usually with the builder's margin applied to the difference. It is different from a prime cost item, which is an allowance for something you have not chosen yet, like tapware or tiles. The thing to understand is that a contract sum carrying a long list of provisional sums is not really a fixed price. Ask what each one is based on, and get the risky ones priced properly before you sign.
Often, yes, and on a Queenslander it can be the difference between building and not. Stage at the structural and wet-area boundary rather than mid-room — do the work that opens up the house and the plumbing in the first contract, and the finishing-out work later. Two things to know. You pay twice for site establishment, scaffold, protection and mobilising trades, so staging costs more in total than doing it once. And the approvals should cover both stages from the start, so you are not re-approving later against rules that may have changed.
Sometimes that is genuinely the right call, and I would rather say so than pretend otherwise. A good builder knows what is expensive to build and their suggestions are often sound. What you should be clear-eyed about is who is on which side of the table. A builder proposing savings on their own price is not adjudicating it, and the savings that are easiest for them are not always the ones that cost you least. Take the suggestions. Have someone with no financial interest in the answer read them before you agree.
If you would rather start small, the First Sketch Session is two hours at your place. You keep the sketches, and there is no obligation afterwards.