Construction company demands extra costs due to cooperation with appraiser

Free market economy. If the [GU] has a good reputation, he has nothing to fear. Otherwise, there are experts who measure the last joint and make complaints.

You don’t have to tell the general contractor beforehand anyway, since the inspector was only commissioned by you and points out defects or says what you should report in your interest. Of course, there are inspectors who don’t leave well enough alone and turn the smallest things into really expensive problems. Because the inspector also has the “problem” that he wants to be worth his money. An inspector who finds nothing during the construction phase is then seen as unnecessary and the builders feel like the money could have been saved. So he then looks for absurd things like 5mm too little air between insulation and masonry or 0.5mm too high an offset between 2 tiles behind the water boiler. There are real defects and then there is nitpicking. Construction companies factor in error correction from the start and an extra item is nonsense. I definitely would not accept that, better to have the contract terminated (of course free of charge for you). If you build with a general contractor, he cannot forbid you the inspector because construction is on your property :)

You could arrange that the expert does not appear in front of the general contractor.

In this sense, I also understand the additional effort item ...

Possibly additional effort when collaborating with external experts (time-consuming, documentation, etc.) 2000-4000€!!!

... not referring to the expert himself, but specifically to the fact that one is supposed to collaborate with him.

I can well understand the general contractor’s point of view and just find it unwise: because the client is either stunned or thinks the general contractor is avoiding a qualified inspector.

However, there is currently a “generation” of builders who, to put it mildly, are not subject to amusement tax: millimeter nazis allying themselves in forums, stomping around the construction site with the attitude of an enlightened customer. Office jockeys who cannot imagine that screed, plaster & co are not measured in troy ounces, and who confuse half-centimeter “precisely” specified wall, wall opening and room dimensions with tight manufacturing tolerances. You don’t lay bricks with the tweezers of a stamp collector – even if King Builder imagines that he read that from his performance specification. When legal action is taken over a 4 cm variance in distance between the ceiling spotlights of a front door canopy, “construction worker” ceases to be a job for real men.

Thank you for your responses. We want an expert precisely because we know that we have no idea and do not want to panic over everything that looks bad to me as a layperson. We also made it clear that we do not want an expert to justify his appointment by nitpicking nonsense at all costs. We even asked if we could be given the names of experts with whom the company has had good experiences. We also want to avoid ending up with a lawyer at some point. We have communicated all of this openly, and then the general contractor comes to us like this... I am annoyed about all the time that was wasted.

and precisely not want to panic over everything that doesn’t look good to me as a layperson.

That is a commendable motivation and attitude.

We even asked if we could be called experts with whom the company had good experiences.

Then the general contractor is an idiot, and you should kiss another frog.

We also had an expert, but he had absolutely nothing to do with the construction management. He just visited the construction site a few times and also did the final inspection with us. He received all the documents he wanted from us. Our prefabricated house company had neither problems nor effort because of that...! However, we had an expert with common sense: "If it is not a technical but only an optical problem, I won't even bother to point it out to you. If you notice it, please mention it; otherwise, I would be creating a problem where there is none... If I do point it out to you, you will always see it in the future." I thought that was extremely reasonable. He clearly identified the "real" problems (such as the windows installed the wrong way).