A building quote lands and it’s bigger than you expected. Before you do anything — negotiate, walk away, sign anyway — you need to know what kind of number you’re looking at: an honest price for a complete scope, a padded price hoping you won’t check, or a small price for an empty scope that will cost the most of all. Reviewing the quote is how you find out, and it takes an evening, not a career in construction.
What a proper builders quotation contains
Review starts with completeness. A quote you can actually assess has:
| Element | What “good” looks like |
|---|---|
| Itemised scope | Line items you can count and check — not “electrical works: $24,000” |
| Quantities and rates | Counts stated (points, m², per-1,000), not “as per plan” |
| Inclusions AND exclusions | Both in writing — the exclusions list is where the truth lives |
| PC/PS allowances | Each allowance named with its figure, so you can benchmark it |
| Referenced documents | Your drawing numbers and engineering revisions, not “plans as supplied” |
| Payment terms | Deposit and progress schedule tied to work stages |
| Validity and timing | Quote expiry, lead time, approximate duration |
A quote missing most of this isn’t reviewable — it’s a number wearing a letterhead. Asking for the itemised version is the first review step, and how the contractor responds is your first finding.
The 20-minute review pass
- Read the exclusions before the inclusions. The exclusions list is the honest part of every quote. “Excavation in other than natural soil excluded” on a shale block is a five-figure sentence.
- Hunt the blanks. Compare the quote against the commonly-missed items for that trade — pump hire on slabs, gutters between roofer and plumber, waterproofing certificates inside tiling packages. A blank is not “included”; a blank is “unpriced”.
- Benchmark every allowance. Tiles at $28/m² and a $600 tapware allowance make the total look small now and cost you the difference at selection time. Run them through the PC/PS benchmark.
- Check the deposit and payment schedule against your state’s rules with the deposit checker — an oversized ask is due-diligence gold.
- Match the documents. The quote should reference your current drawing and engineering revisions. A quote priced off superseded drawings is a variation machine.
“My building quote seems too high” — the diagnostic
High against what? That’s the whole question, and it has exactly three honest answers:
- High against your budget. The quote may be fair and your budget built from online cost guides that run 12–24 months behind real prices. Painful, but the quote isn’t the problem — recalibrate with the finance reality check before blaming the contractor.
- High against other quotes. Level them first — the trade-by-trade comparers or the levelling spreadsheet — because an $8,800 spread between slab quotes is usually three different scopes, not one dear contractor. The dearest total is often the most complete scope, quietly pricing everything the cheap one left out.
- High against the market. The one you can’t easily see from inside your own project — busy contractors price jobs they don’t need at “worth-my-while” rates. The tell: a round number, thin itemisation, slow answers to scope questions. This is where an independent set of eyes earns its keep.
And when a quote seems too low
The quote 20% under the pack is the one to review hardest. Cheap has exactly four sources: an emptier scope, lowballed allowances, a contractor in cashflow trouble buying your deposit, or a genuine gap in their pricing they’ll recover in variations. Occasionally it’s a good operator with a hole in their schedule — the review is how you find out which one you’re holding. Check the blanks, the allowances and the deposit ask, in that order.
Building contract review: when the quote becomes a contract
A quote is a price; a building contract is the price plus the rules — and the contract review is a separate job from the quote review. Once you accept a builder’s or trade’s number, that figure gets wrapped into a contract (often an HIA or Master Builders standard form, sometimes the contractor’s own), and the clauses around the price decide what actually happens when the build meets reality. Review the contract, not just the total, before you sign.
The clauses that matter more than the headline number:
| Clause | What a building contract review checks |
|---|---|
| Contract sum & inclusions | The quoted scope is carried in verbatim — no quietly narrowed inclusions between quote and contract |
| Deposit | Within your state’s cap (10% under $20k / 5% over in most states) — run it through the deposit checker |
| Progress payments | Tied to completed stages, not front-loaded; each stage defined so “frame complete” isn’t a matter of opinion |
| PC & PS allowances | Every allowance named with its figure, so a blowout is visible, not a surprise |
| Variations | A written process with pricing before work proceeds — not a blank cheque signed at the point of a stalled site |
| Liquidated damages & time | A start date, a build period, and what happens when it slips |
| Cooling-off & suspension | Your rights to pause or exit, and the contractor’s to suspend for non-payment |
For an owner-builder the contract review matters even more, because you hold the responsibilities a head-builder’s contract would normally carry — every trade contract is one you’re administering. Read the exclusions, price the allowances, check the deposit and the variation clause, in that order. When a contract is genuinely one-sided or the numbers don’t reconcile with the quote, that’s the moment to get an independent set of eyes on it before your signature makes it binding.
What “getting a quote reviewed” actually means
You can do the structural review yourself with the checklist above — most people can, in an evening per quote. What you can’t easily do from inside your first build is the market layer: whether the piering rate is right for your area, whether that allowance survives contact with a tile shop, which blanks are normal practice and which are bait. That’s the $290 Quote Teardown: your actual quotes, levelled against current market rates, findings in writing within 48 hours — and it pays for itself with the first gap it finds.