Building Permit Approved

Our Building Permit was approved today. Orbit Homes use Checkpoint Building Surveyors. Looks like we avoided the need to get flood dispensation which was a requirement for a number of people in the nearby Sarah Lands development.

The next stage is the ordering of materials for the house. Apparently this process takes about 3 to 4 weeks. Once this is process is complete Orbit will book in site commencement.

The Building Supervisor

This morning I went out to Solsbury Field to meet the Orbit Building Supervisor and to inspect the site. The building supervisor turned out to be a very personable fellow who has been with Orbit for the last 18 years. Apparently there are about 9 Building Supervisors working for Orbit in Victoria.  As you would expect our supervisor looks after the South East of Melbourne with the majority of his builds being in the Cranbourne and Clyde. He usually has between 10 and 15 builds taking place at any one time. We are not given the contact details of the Building Supervisor, however. Orbit believes that the owner should deal with a single person during the build. Namely, the customer service officer. The only problem I can see with this is if you want discuss an on-site issue it might take longer going via the issue. Still, to date the Customer Service Officer has been responsive and pro-active.

There has already been about six site starts in Solsbury Field as of today. The one pictured above is the most progressed with slab, frame and roof complete. This is quite an achievement given settlement on the land was less than a month ago. The site of this build is a located behind the property of our Southern neighbour. We are hoping that our Building permit will be issued this week. 

Building Permit Application

Orbit Homes applied for the building permit for our house last Thursday. I am most grateful to them for submitting the application before I supplied them with all the “essential information” required under the contract. It has taken longer than I had anticipated for the bank to process my original request for a build loan as an advance on the land loan. Under the contract the signed documentation for the build loan is one of the items of essential information required prior to the building permit application. 

However, today I received advice that the land loan advance has been approved and I will be receiving the documentation to sign in the next couple of days.

I understand that the usual timeframe for building permit approval is 2 weeks.

Our Loan to the State Government

One thing I noticed when calculating costs associated with land settlement was there was a discrepancy between the land transfer duty calculated by the mortgage broker and that calculated by the conveyancer. Indeed the difference amounted to several thousand dollars. In an attempt to work out who was right I went online and used several of the stamp duty calculators available. The result in each case agreed with the lower figure provided by the mortgage broker.

I eventually worked out that the difference was related to the Principle Place of Residence Concession. What the online calculators don’t tell you is that if you purchase vacant land you cannot  claim this concession until an occupancy certificate is issued for the house that is constructed on your land. In the interim you are effectively providing an interest free loan for thousands of dollars to the state government.

Settlement

Settlement took place on Tuesday September 29 as planned. We now officially own a very small part of this wide brown land. So now our focus naturally turns to the house build itself

According to the contract the Building Period is 150 working days excluding weekends, Public holidays and Christmas closure.. Of course, the building period  doesn’t start until site commencement. It’ll be interesting to see how long it will take Orbit homes to start the build. However, site commencement can’t happen until the building permit has been issued. Under the contract, the builder is not required to apply for the building permit until we provide them with “essential information” including satisfactory evidence of our title to the land and satisfactory evidence of our capacity to pay the contract price. As the build loan is a further advance on the land loan it couldn’t be processed until after settlement. We are now waiting on the bank to undertake this processing.