Builder contract at a fixed price - offer for additional work

Hello everyone!

I would like to buy a condominium that is being offered by a developer at a fixed price.
I have some change requests for the standard floor plan (several apartments with the same floor plan are planned) and have also asked the developer to provide these as an offer.

Specifically, it concerns the elimination of a second bathroom, the shifting of a wall, the additional installation of a bathtub, the repositioning of the utility room, and the additional installation of two windows. For more details, see the pictures attached.

The total purchase price of the apartment including the exterior facilities amounts to €96,500 gross. I received an offer of €8,000 gross for the additional services, which was also created at a fixed price.

The offer seems very high to me, especially since all work except for the additional windows should be nearly cost-neutral. Now to my questions:

1. Do I have the right to request a breakdown of the costs for the additional work?
2. Do you have any tips for how I can negotiate the offer down?

Thank you very much for your help!

The only "right" you have is to ask kindly and hope for an answer ;). The developer at least has the right to say no and then sell to another interested party.

Whether you can negotiate "I am not willing to pay the €8k, how can you accommodate me?" is a matter of supply and demand. With a purchase price of €96.5k, I assume you want to buy somewhere in a very affordable area (east, ADW, very rural, or similar - €1,100/sqm living space including land share, where in many regions of Germany you can't even build for that, let alone make money as a developer!!!). Demand is probably not very high there, so the developer will likely be more willing to make concessions – provided the surcharge initially fills the developer’s wallet and is actually too high.

In itself, it doesn't matter how he arrives at the price and whether you find it cheap or expensive.

But he definitely has planning costs, possibly structural recalculations, etc., which he wouldn't have if you kept the standard floor plan.

These come in addition to "visible" changes.

Try to negotiate, if the apartments are in demand, it will probably be hopeless.

Then you have to decide whether the apartment is still worth being bought by you at the new price.

On the standard floor plan (several apartments with the same floor plan are planned)

Now every craftsman involved has to look at the plans several times to be pulled out of their routine movements – you can definitely bill that as BT. That's already a few fairly expensive craftsman hours... a layperson should keep that in mind to understand the additional costs.

And since you want to change the rooms with a lot of technology right now, I can already imagine that it won't be cheap, because there are possibly [Trassen (Strom, Wasser, Abwasser)] planned, which run through the whole house... and now these possibly have to be partially relocated...

Hello.

seems very expensive in relation to the purchase price. But do you have a choice other than to ask?

You can try nicely and post the answer here.

In our case, we got fair prices for the modification. Non-load-bearing walls were even moved "cost-neutral". By the way, that was my favorite word back then.