Woman's new home build hit with extra $213,000 bill as costs rise

The woman signed up for a $900,000 dream home that will now cost $1.2 million as prices rise. Photo / 123RF

By RNZ

A woman in the process of building her dream home has been lumped with an extra $213,000 bill as building costs rise.

This comes after figures from CoreLogic show the cost to build a 200sq m, three-bedroom home has shot up by 3.4 per cent and annual growth has increased by 9.6 per cent.

A year and a half ago, one woman signed up for what she thought was going to be her $900,000 dream family home.

But just months into the process, she quickly realised the fixed prices quoted were far too good to be true.

"They put estimates in for the kitchen and bathroom and the rest of it, and then when you go to pick your bits - so you agree on this price - and you can get nothing for what they have estimated."

In August this year, she was given a dreaded update, her new build had gone up 24 per cent to a whopping $1.2 million.

That has taken her mortgage from $400,000, which included landscaping, to more than $650,000, without those extras.

Being an accountant, she immediately queried the numbers from her builder.

"He keeps saying that he's staying to the original quotes, but he's not at all, like there's no real visibility behind the numbers."

Of the $213,000 increase, earthworks increased by $29,000, plumbing by $23,000, roofing by $17,000, and framing hardware extras cost her an extra $16,000 just to name a few.

But Coromandel-based builder Chris Pollock, from Hotwater Beach Construction, says those numbers don't stack up.

"Someone's either got it very wrong in the beginning or they're just gouging or whatever you want to call it, or to a certain extent they've probably been caught - because they've used contractors, they've all put their prices up and the whole lot of that looks highly suspect."

Pollock has got about an 8 per cent increase across the board for his building costs, the biggest driver being building materials.

"[Framing] timber has probably gone up 10 per cent, all up, for me," he said.

"Aluminium joinery, I've just done a job where it's gone up about 15 per cent since it was quoted a year ago."

While access to GIB has eased from about a three to five-month wait to about a month, shipping delays are still compounding the problems.

Pollock used to do fixed pricing for his clients but after Covid-19's disruption, he said it was impossible.

But he said he tried to remain as transparent as possible with his clients when costs did rise.

"For this job I'm doing at the moment, I just show them all the invoices.

"I mean there's thousands of them as you can imagine in a house. I'm just being an open book about it, saying look, I've got to make something out of it."

Master Builders chief executive David Kelly said that was not something that was happening with all builders, but it should be.

"That's a good practice, set out the basis for your estimates right at the beginning, say this is how I've based it in terms of different materials as they go along, to explain what the differences [are] between what they've estimated in the beginning and what they're actually now paying.

"Our view is that they should be very careful about giving fixed prices in the current environment."

Pollock said the cost of wages for his team had risen from $65 to about $75 an hour.

Kelly said the industry was struggling for workers.

"We haven't got enough skilled people in the industry and the constraints on bringing people in have continued to push wages up and competition for scarce expertise."

The rise in costs had left the woman with the $1.2m under-construction home in a desperate situation. She said she would not have signed up for it in the first place if she had known this would happen.

She said she has had to borrow money from her family, but others would not be as fortunate. And if she had stayed with the bank, she would have lost her deposit, she said.

"Oh it makes me feel sick. So I don't even want to do it now and I'm kind of thinking as soon as I'm finished, I might flick it off, I don't quite know what to do."

CoreLogic is predicting construction costs to accelerate further, potentially to double digits by the end of the year.