Building with GU - were you able to "negotiate," what did you negotiate?

Preliminary: This is not about naming the companies that may have lowered the final price, and we do not consider the possibility of negotiating something further for the client to be decisive for the decision on whom we want to build with.

The question of to what extent the final price is negotiable or if chargeable extras can be negotiated out has so far not played any role in the discussions with 2 providers.

A friend who is an architect told us that you can usually negotiate a little with a large general contractor, but we just shouldn’t consider the initially stated prices as 100% final once a decision has been made for one or the other. Usually, a little more is still possible.

Is this your experience? Were you able to reduce a few percent or negotiate some extras? As said, I don’t want to hear any names of providers, just general interest if that is the case.

Well, we are currently just happy to even get a building window ...!
(additional south-western area of Hamburg)

I would rather like to add something to speed it up.
But it doesn't work, which is probably a good thing.

Since this is a property, but an opaque mixed calculation, there is certainly some room for a discount.

As I used to deal a lot with construction defects from a legal perspective professionally, let me tell you: the price is insignificant, the result has to be right in the end.
Unfortunately, you just don't know beforehand ...

Given the current situation, it is difficult to negotiate... if you don't build, someone else will come...

But yes, we were able to "recover" quite a bit, but it was often because defects appeared here and there and a reduction was demanded because the final result was not quite as it was on paper, or plans were released too early and we hadn't signed them yet, etc.

Then you can negotiate... however, it is only peanuts compared to the construction sum...

So we were able to negotiate the controlled residential ventilation system and a few smaller points. Building in NRW, provider is located in Siegerland.

Our general contractor, in my opinion, had fair prices. You really couldn’t negotiate the price itself.

However, many things that others might have charged for separately were included by him from the start. With the construction contract, I often insisted that certain services be included. This always only caused the boss (we negotiated with the boss) to shake his head. He eventually said something along the lines of: “Normally, we would have just done these jobs right away. Now that it’s written in the contract, we have to charge for it.” Back then, I didn’t have the trust and preferred to have it written down. Now I know that at the time, he really would have done it right away (which showed with other points). His subcontractors partly handled it similarly (for example, the civil engineers who once brought in half a truckload of gravel without charging us extra or later concreted the mailbox posts for us). It always applies: what you shout into the forest is what echoes back. They wouldn’t have been so accommodating for a “pain in the neck.”

Our general contractor also passed on his discounts to us. For example, with the tiles, the tile center was very confused that the 10% was deducted from our price instead of being kept by the general contractor.

Extras occurred more because of things he couldn’t influence: for example, a deeper geothermal drilling or a survey remeasurement for electrical work or similar.

Where in RLP do you want to build? Maybe they operate in your region as well.

So we were able to negotiate the controlled residential ventilation system and a few smaller points.

Worth ...?

Rhineland regards