How to read a Queensland home building contract

A Queensland home building contract is a pile of documents that pretends to be a single booklet. The schedule on the first pages is the job you think you bought. The general conditions are the job you will actually inhabit. The specifications, plans, soil report, engineering and colour sheet are the job the certifier will recognise. If those layers disagree, the disagreement has a winner. Your reading is an attempt to find that winner before you date the thing.

Most owners are handed a Housing Industry Association form, a Master Builders Queensland form, or the QBCC's own new-home construction contract. The clause numbers move. The legal skeleton does not. Schedule 1B of the Queensland Building and Construction Commission Act 1991 implies conditions you cannot contract out of, caps what may be taken as a deposit, describes a cooling-off, and requires the contract to say how the price is calculated. Industry stationery does not repeal that.

This is a reading method, not a substitute for a solicitor who will mark the special conditions. Use it beside the fixed-price versus cost-plus argument and the QBCC licence check you should have finished before anyone put a pen in your hand.

Start with the implied conditions, not the glossy schedule

The Act implies that the work will be carried out in an appropriate and skilful way, with reasonable care and skill, using suitable materials, in accordance with the plans and specifications, and in accordance with all relevant laws and legal requirements. There is an implied warranty that the home will be suitable for occupation when the work is finished. You cannot sign those away. A special condition that says the owner accepts "all risk in the design" does not turn a sloppy frame into a skilful one.

What the implied conditions do not do is invent a house you failed to specify. "Reasonable care" is not a second kitchen. If the plans show a laundry without a tub, the implied conditions will not grow one. The fight worth having is the fight between the brochure and the specification. Put the display-home inclusions next to the contract inclusions and mark every downgrade. That list is the real negotiation.

The contract must attach, or clearly identify, the plans and specifications. A schedule that says "plans to be finalised" is not a regulated contract in any useful sense. It is an invitation to argue later about what was included. Refuse to date it.

Cooling-off is shorter, dearer and easier to lose than folklore says

The folk version is that you have two weeks, for free, to change your mind. The statute is colder. On a regulated contract — domestic building work above the current QBCC money threshold, for years a low four-figure sum — you generally have five business days to withdraw, starting the day after you receive a signed copy of the entire contract, including plans and specifications. For contracts at or above the higher threshold, you must also have received the QBCC Consumer Building Guide. If the builder dribbles those documents, the clock does not start. That is the one piece of folklore that is true.

Withdrawal must be written, signed, and explicit that you are using section 35 of Schedule 1B. You will owe a small statutory amount plus the builder's reasonable out-of-pocket expenses. The five days are not a free design service.

You cannot use cooling-off if, before you entered the contract, you received formal legal advice about it from a practising lawyer, or you told the builder that you had. You also cannot use it to walk away from a replacement contract on substantially the same terms for the same site. Builders who suggest you "just get your solicitor to look at it quickly so we can start" are sometimes being helpful. They are also sometimes closing the only door the Act left open.

A related myth: cooling-off does not apply to every residential job, and it does not pause finance. If you need the five days, do not also waive them in a special condition you did not understand.

Deposits and progress payments are consumer-protection machinery

The Act limits the deposit that may be taken before work starts. For years the structure has been about ten per cent where the contract price sits below the higher threshold, about five per cent at or above that threshold, and a larger cap — commonly twenty per cent — where more than half the value is off-site work. Those percentages are the long-standing statutory pattern; confirm the current thresholds on the QBCC deposits page before you transfer anything. Paying more than the cap is not a gesture of trust. It is how owners shrink their Home Warranty recovery if the builder later disappears.

Progress payments after the deposit are, in principle, for the parties to design. In practice they follow stages: base, frame, enclosed, fixing, practical completion, with names that vary by form. The law still requires each claim to be proportionate to the work completed on site. A builder who wants half the contract price when the slab is poured is not cash-flowing. They are front-loading.

Never pay a stage early to be liked. Never pay a stage because the cabinet-maker "needs a deposit" that is not in your contract. The Home Warranty scheme has long told owners that paying ahead reduces cover. The contract is the payment schedule. Everything else is a request.

If the form allows claims at intervals rather than stages, demand evidence of the work in the period. A cost-plus job without invoices is not a job. It is an allowance.

Liquidated damages are often a joke. Treat them as a choice

Most industry forms let you insert a daily rate if the builder finishes late. The default, or the rate a salesman pencils in, is sometimes a dollar, or a figure that would not cover a night in a motel. That is not an accident. It is a price.

Liquidated damages must be a genuine pre-estimate of your loss, not a penalty. For a household paying rent and a mortgage, a genuine estimate is not trivial. Calculate the weekly cost of being locked out of the house — rent, storage, extra commuting — and convert it to a day rate. Put that number in the schedule. A builder who refuses any serious rate is telling you who will carry delay.

Read the extensions of time. Wet weather, variations you requested, late selections, and "matters beyond the builder's control" will eat the calendar. Some of those extensions are fair. An open-ended force majeure that includes the builder's own supply failures is not a climate clause. It is a deletion of the completion date.

Prime-cost items, and the other holes in the number

Prime-cost and provisional-sum allowances are dealt with at more length in the fixed-price piece. In a close reading you are looking for three things: a quantity, a rate that could buy the item shown to you, and a margin rule you can calculate on a napkin.

If the PC schedule says "cooktop — allowance" with a dollar figure and no make, take the display-home cooktop's current retail price and compare. The difference is the first variation. If the PS for rock is a round number with no cubic rate, you are underwriting a lottery.

The implied conditions still require the allowances to have been estimated reasonably. That is a later argument. The cheaper argument is the one you have before you sign.

Practical completion is a defined event

Practical completion, on the usual Queensland forms, is when the work is complete except for minor defects and minor omissions, and the home is reasonably suitable for habitation. It is also, not coincidentally, when a very large payment falls due.

The builder must give notice. You inspect. You list. The useful list separates three piles: incomplete contracted work, defective contracted work, and things you now wish you had specified. Only the first two belong in a practical-completion argument. The third is a new contract, or a weekend with a licensed tradesperson.

Do not confuse practical completion with the certifier's paperwork. A house can be practically complete under the contract and still be waiting on a final inspection certificate. A house can have a Form 21 and still have a leaking shower. The contract payment and the statutory certificates are related and they are not the same switch.

Withholding the last payment because you are angry is how owners lose at QCAT. Withholding in accordance with a clause, for a quantified incomplete item, is how the form was meant to work. Read the retention, if any. Many new-home forms have none, which is a reason to be more careful at the inspection, not less.

Form 16s, Form 15s and the paper the certifier actually trusts

Queensland building work is inspected in stages. A competent person — often the builder, an engineer, or a licensed inspector — issues a Form 16 inspection certificate for a stage: footings, slab, frame, and so on. A Form 15 is a compliance certificate for a design or specification, typically an engineer's. For a class 1a house the certifier's final document is usually a Form 21 final inspection certificate. The numbers live in the Building Regulation and they do get revised; what does not change is the idea. The private certifier is allowed to rely on these certificates. You should collect copies.

Ask, at each stage claim, whether the relevant Form 16 exists. A progress claim for "frame complete" without a frame inspection is a story. You are not the certifier and you should not pretend to be one. You are a person who should not pay for a stage the statutory system has not yet recognised.

Form 16s are not a warranty that the house is beautiful. They are a statement that an inspectable stage, viewed a certain way, complied. Keep them with the approval set. When a later defect appears, the question "who signed the stage?" is a better starting point than a Facebook group.

A reading order you can finish in an evening

Do this with a pencil, in this order, and stop if any step fails:

1. Parties, licence number, site address. Check the licence on the QBCC register the same afternoon.
2. Contract price, fixed or not, and the warning about provisions that alter it.
3. Deposit, progress table, and whether the percentages look like the work.
4. Cooling-off, Consumer Building Guide, and whether you have already waived anything.
5. PC and PS schedules; rise and fall; delayed start.
6. Variations: who signs, and whether site instructions count.
7. Time: start date, completion period, extensions, liquidated damages.
8. Practical completion definition and the last payment.
9. Special conditions. Read them last and slowest. This is where the printed form is quietly rewritten.
10. The list of contract documents. If the soil report is not on it, the soil report is a rumour.

If you want the desk behind this method, it is in costs and contracts: date the piece of paper, name the statute, do not let a cover page do your thinking. A Brisbane house is expensive. The contract is the only document that will still be in the drawer when the excitement has worn off.