Twelve questions to ask a builder before you sign

By the time you are choosing a builder, you have probably absorbed the standard advice: ask questions. What nobody tells you is which ones. Most of the questions homeowners ask get answered with reassurance, and reassurance is free. 'Are you reliable?' has never once been answered with no.

The questions below are different. Each one asks for something specific: a document, a name, a number, a mechanism. They work because a builder who runs a good business can answer them easily, and a builder who cannot answer them easily has just saved you from finding that out in month three. A good builder will not mind any of these. That is most of the point of asking them.

The twelve questions

1. 01Who exactly will be on my job, and who is my one point of contact? You are hiring the people who show up, not the person who quoted. Get the site foreman's name, find out how much of the work is the builder's own team versus subcontractors, and get one name whose phone you can ring about anything. Jobs with one point of contact run calmer than jobs where you relay messages through whoever answers.
2. 02Who is the Licensed Building Practitioner for my job, and are they doing the work or supervising it? Restricted building work, the structural and weathertightness work, legally requires an LBP carrying it out or supervising it, and both arrangements are legitimate. You want to know which you are getting, whose name will be on the Record of Work, and you can check them on the public LBP register in two minutes.
3. 03Can I see the contract you intend to use, before I commit to anything? Residential work of $30,000 or more including GST legally requires a written contract with prescribed disclosure information, so the document exists. Reading it before you are emotionally committed is the single cheapest protection available to you. Reluctance to hand it over early is its own answer.
4. 04How many provisional sums and prime cost items are in this price, and can you list them on one page? These allowances are where fixed prices flex. A short, defensible list means the builder priced the job. A long list means they estimated it, whatever the cover page says.
5. 05How do variations work on your jobs, in writing, with prices, before or after the work is done? The answer you want is documented, priced and signed before the work happens. Variations invoiced after the fact are the single most common source of building disputes, and how a builder answers this tells you how they handle the moment interests diverge.
6. 06What exactly is excluded from this price? Ask for the exclusions as a written list and go through it item by item. Consent fees, engineering, scaffolding, demolition disposal, landscaping, appliances: every excluded item lands in your budget somewhere else, and you want the full list on one page rather than discovered one surprise at a time.
7. 07Who manages the building consent and answers council's requests for further information? Every RFI stops the statutory clock, and slow answers quietly add weeks. You want the builder or their designer owning those responses, with a straight answer about who does what, because a consent nobody owns is a consent that drifts.
8. 08What does your payment schedule look like, and what is each payment tied to? Payments tied to visible progress protect both sides. Large upfront deposits and date-driven payments do not. Walk through the schedule stage by stage and make sure each payment maps to something you can stand in front of.
9. 09How do you run the snag list at the end, and does it close before or after handover? The end of a build reveals a builder's character. Our answer is that we walk the job with you, write the list together, and close every item before handover rather than after. Whatever a builder's answer is, get it specifically, because 'we always sort those things out' is reassurance, not a mechanism.
10. 10What happens when I find a problem eight months after completion? The Building Act gives you a twelve-month period in which notified defects must be remedied, with the burden on the builder to show a defect is not theirs, on top of ten-year implied warranties. A good builder describes their callback process without being prompted about the law. A builder who seems surprised by the question is worth being surprised about.
11. 11What insurance covers the job while it is being built, and can I see the certificates? Ask what happens if the half-built house burns down, floods or is stolen from, and whose policy responds. Any established builder can produce current certificates of insurance without drama. You are not being difficult by asking. You are being the second most interested party in the answer.
12. 12Can I speak to someone whose job you finished a year or more ago? Anyone can supply a delighted client from last month. A homeowner a year on has been through the defects period, the callbacks and the paperwork, and knows how the house is actually performing. One unhurried phone conversation with them is worth more than everything on the builder's website.

How to actually use these

Do not fire all twelve across a table like an audit. Spread them across the site visit and the quote conversations, in your own words, and write the answers down, because answers you can compare are the entire value of asking. Every builder you are considering should get the same questions, and the comparison is where the signal lives.

One more practical habit: ask for the documents as you go, not as a bundle at the end. The contract after the first serious conversation, the insurance certificates and the allowance list with the quote, the programme before you sign. Builders organised enough to produce paperwork on request are usually organised enough to build your house, and the correlation runs the other way too.

You will notice that none of the twelve is 'are you any good?'. Quality shows up sideways, in mechanisms and paperwork and the willingness to be pinned down. The builders who resent precise questions are the reason to ask them, and the builders worth hiring answer them all the time. It is most of how they got to be worth hiring.