Price increases in construction contracts related to Corona

a few few

There is always some clause. And if not that one, then at the latest the payment schedule that does not add up. If it were up to "small details," no contract for work would be signed. [off topic oder auch nicht] No anesthesia would be administered and no surgery performed either... :rolleyes:

After reading similar posts about price escalation clauses in current construction contracts, here is an update from me: after a revision, the clause was linked to a price index for single-family houses without a basement, as recommended by : an increase of up to 5 points (= 5%) is borne by the general contractor, an increase beyond that affects us as the client. Over a period of 12 months, there has hardly been an increase of more than 5 points in recent years – the only major outlier was the period from Nov 20 to Feb 21 with 6 points, in which presumably the VAT also played a role. Now I’m not quite sure what this ultimately means for the construction price with a start in summer 2022 (last adjustment at the end of the execution planning). There was no clear reference to material costs anymore, even though the clause is justified by rising raw material prices, it rather seemed to relate to the entire house offer. Of course, we will clarify this in the next meeting.

Since our incidental construction costs with difficult development conditions (large trees, excessively long access road, soil conditions only accessible via neighbor) and earthworks have so far only been estimated and set very high in the almost six-figure range, we followed your advice and requested a soil survey, sewer contractor, etc. We are not organizing anything ourselves at the house, I have 3 kids to take care of and my husband works too much, but we could have imagined doing this for development and earthworks. However, we will not receive the soil survey any earlier than in 2 months (Munich region), which delays the schedule. Therefore, we discussed the development costs again with the general contractor and have now received a planning offer including soil survey, determination of all development costs (with sewer and earthworks contractors, tree care specialist on site, etc.), energy calculation for subsidy application starting 07/01, “construction reservation,” and the previous planning with the architect’s design of the single-family house. Cost: €18,000, which will be fully deducted from the offer upon contract conclusion (we are not yet bound to the plot, in case the incidental costs are extremely expensive, but of course we want to build). How do you assess such a planning offer?

We have the same clause. However, the period between the signature and the "Erhöhungsrelevanten" date is only two months for us, so we have slightly higher security. By the way, you can request the current indices using the contact form on the destatis website – we received a good response with the detailed values up to and including April within 2 hours the day before yesterday.

This way, you could inform yourselves in advance at a reasonable time, without waiting for the new quarterly report.