In brief
There are four things to check: the company on paper, the people who will actually be on your site, the way the contractor works, and what he has built before. The paperwork tells you whether the company exists and who stands behind it; it does not tell you whether it builds well. A conversation tells you whether there is any order to the way he works; it does not tell you whether the company can pay its subcontractors. So you check all four. You do not need to be a construction expert to do it – you ask who does what and when, instead of asking whether someone is reliable. Then ask me the same questions.
You do not need to know building to vet a builder
When someone chooses a contractor for a house on this scale, it is usually the first time in their life. I have sat through a good many of these conversations as a general contractor, and I know that most of the questions asked in them check nothing at all. “Do you have experience with houses like this?” Everyone says yes. “Do you keep to schedule?” Everyone says yes. You learn nothing from those answers, because there is no other way to answer them.
So instead of asking whether someone keeps an eye on quality, ask who looks at what, and when, before a stage gets covered up. Instead of asking whether he keeps to schedule, ask what the schedule is based on and where in it the drying times sit. Questions like that get answered either with specifics or with generalities, and you can hear which straight away. You do not have to judge the technical answer alone: write it down and show it to your architect or your inspector. What you are listening for is whether there is any settled way of working on the other side of the table at all.
One question in this set is my favourite, because it cannot be brushed off: what serious problems have you had on your builds, and what did you do about them. A contractor who says there were none has either built two houses or is not telling you everything. One who can tell you how he solved a specific problem shows you something no presentation can. (I have my own answer to that question, and it is not short.)
The company on paper – what your advisor will check
Hand this part to your lawyer, or to someone who reads financial statements for a living – an advisor, an accountant. They will do it better than I would; I will only describe what these papers tell you and what they do not.
What can be checked without asking anyone for permission: the extract from the business register (for a company, the National Court Register; for a sole trader, the CEIDG register) – who represents the firm, since when it has existed, whether it has been through restructuring or insolvency proceedings; the state-run National Register of Debtors (KRZ), which is public; the VAT taxpayer list, together with the bank account your payments will go to; and, for companies, the annual financial statements, which are filed with the registry court and which anyone can download free of charge. From those, an advisor can judge the scale of the firm and its liquidity: whether it looks able to run a build without living off your advance payments. A sole trader files no such statements, so there is less to read there. Then there are the documents you ask the firm itself for, because only the firm can obtain them: certificates showing no arrears in taxes and social insurance contributions, and the firm’s liability insurance policy – a building company is not required by law to hold one (licensed professionals such as the site manager carry their own mandatory cover through their chamber), so ask whether it has one and exactly what it covers.
Now for what these papers will not tell you. No entry in a debtors’ register does not mean there are no debts; it means nobody has entered them. A financial statement shows the position at the end of last year, not on the day you are talking. A certificate of no arrears is true on the day it was issued. And none of these documents says whether the company builds well; they only say it exists and who answers for it. Paperwork is a bit like a building licence: it confirms someone met the formal requirements, not how he works on site.
The people – who will actually be on your site
Polish construction law has no such figure as a general contractor. The participants in the building process are the investor, the designer, the site manager (or the works manager) and, where one has been appointed, the owner’s supervision inspector. The fact that I answer for the whole thing comes from the contract between us. For what happens on site in the eyes of the regulations, the site manager answers personally – even when he is the contractor’s employee. So the first question about people is: who will be the site manager on my build, is he on the firm’s payroll, and how often will he be on site. His licence can be checked by name in a public register, and his chamber membership with the chamber itself; it takes a moment. What the register cannot check, you check in conversation: a site manager who signs off work over the phone is not a site manager. He is supposed to turn up, climb into the excavation or onto the roof, and measure.
Second question: how many builds are you running at the same time, and who will physically be on mine. This is not a question about commitment; it is arithmetic. A person can walk a certain number of sites in a week, and on each of them he has to be there when the site needs him, not when he has time. A residence takes around two years to build, so one start a year means two live builds at most – that is how many I run, and that is the number I would check with anyone.
Third: the owner’s supervision inspector. This is the person on your side. He represents you, checks quality and materials, signs off work that is about to be covered up, can order work uncovered if it was covered without him, and at your request checks the accounts as well. The law does not allow the site manager and the inspector to be the same person – and rightly so, because in practice one works for the contractor and the other for you. Tell the contractor you will be hiring your own inspector from day one, and watch the reaction. On my builds an inspector on the investor’s side is there from the first day – independent of me and of the site manager; I wrote about this when describing working with a finished design and its architect.
Fourth: subcontractors. The fact that you talk to one person does not mean one person is working on the house. Ask who will be doing the structure, the roof and the services, and how many years the contractor has worked with those people. A crew he has worked with for years means someone knows their standard and knows where to watch them; a crew from an advertisement means you will be checking them together, on your house. And ask about control between the formal sign-offs: who looks at the walls after the first courses, rather than only at the ring beam. Walls get checked after three to five courses of block, because at that point a correction means taking down a metre of wall, not a storey. I once took a crew off a build at exactly that stage – after four courses, the wall was more than 3 cm out of plumb, and they saw no problem with it. A good contractor has that kind of check after every step, regardless of whether the stage was done by his own people or by a subcontractor, and separately from what the site manager does. One more question that says a lot: when did you last take someone off a build, and why. If in all his years it has not happened once, it usually means he was not checking.
The process – where the price comes from, how changes get in, where information comes from
I have written about the way I work in several separate texts, so here only briefly – what to listen for in the answers.
Where will the price come from, and when will I hear it. A binding price given at the first meeting, with no documentation and no look at the plot, is guesswork, and the risk of guesswork comes back to you during the build. The price should come after the design and the plot have been examined, in writing, for a scope that has been written down. Where such a price comes from and why it does not change afterwards, I described in the text on the lump-sum contract.
What happens when I change my mind, or when something comes up during the build. A change should be priced before it is carried out, itemised and with its effect on the schedule, and the contractor pays for his own mistakes. “We will sort it out somehow” means you will learn the cost from the invoice. The whole procedure is in the text on changes during construction.
What the schedule is based on. If the schedule has no allowance for concrete to cure and the house to dry out, that time will come out anyway – during the build, as a delay. Where the two years come from, I set out quarter by quarter.
Where and how often will I hear what is going on. There should be a fixed rhythm and one person who answers the phone. “Call whenever you need something” is the absence of an answer. What this looks like day to day is in the text on living alongside the build.
The past – references you can actually check
With an ordinary house, a contractor shows you photographs and addresses. With a residence he usually cannot, because he promised the owners discretion – so no photographs online is not a bad sign in itself. It is worse if he drives you to other people’s gates and shows you their interiors on his phone without the owners’ clear consent: that is how he will show your house one day. You have to check differently.
The first route is a conversation with someone he has already built for – with that person’s consent, at the stage when both sides know the talks are serious. Do not ask whether they were satisfied; everyone you are put on the phone with was satisfied, because the contractor chose them. Ask what went wrong and what the contractor did about it. How changes were settled. Who was on site when they came by. And one question that says the most: would they call him again.
The second route is a visit to a live site. You do not need to know anything about bricklaying to see a few things: what is lying in the mud and what is under sheeting and a roof; whether the site is in order or you have to squeeze between piles of waste; whether the person showing you around knows the people by name and can tell you, without looking at any papers, what will be done next week. It is harder to hide things on a site than in a presentation.
The third route is an architect or an inspector who has worked with this contractor. They see him from a side you will not: whether he kept to the design or corrected it on his own initiative, whether he called for work to be signed off before it disappeared under plaster. If you come with your own architect, his questions to the contractor are worth more than yours – ask them together.
And one reservation to finish with: a recommendation from a friend is only the beginning of the checking. I have seen a tradesman who came with a glowing recommendation fail to deliver what was expected of him. Ask the person recommending him, too, what went wrong.
The contract and the documents – bring a lawyer
Come to the contract conversation with a lawyer. A contract for building a residence should be read by someone who reads contracts for a living. I am not a lawyer, so what follows is only what I look for in contracts myself.
The minimum is simple: who will do the work (the firm’s full details, not a name off a business card), exactly what, from when to when, for how much, and on what terms anything paid for separately will be charged. The biggest disputes come from the second point. “Turnkey” and “everything included” are slogans. The scope is the design together with a description of the standard and a list of what is outside the price – written down, because two years later each side will remember it differently. In law, the design documentation required by the regulations forms part of the contract, and in case of doubt the contractor is taken to have undertaken everything that is in the design; so a contractor who did not read the design before giving a price has priced something he does not know.
Payments should follow the stages that have been signed off. An advance for materials is normal – nobody serious will lay out large sums blind for your house – but its size, and what comes after it, should stay within common sense: every further payment after sign-off, for the part that has been done.
Subcontractors have their place in the contract for a legal reason as well: for the pay of a subcontractor whose detailed scope of work was notified to you before he started, and to whom you did not object in time, you may be liable jointly with the contractor, within the limits the regulations set. So the reason to know who is working on your build and how they are being paid is also a legal one. How to structure it, your lawyer will decide.
The construction log is yours. It is the investor who applies for it, if only through an attorney, and in its electronic form it is the investor who grants access to the other participants. The site manager keeps it, but you can read it as you go: it should contain the entries on the sign-off of work that is about to disappear under concrete or plaster, and that is the most important formal trace that somebody looked at it before it did – so agree that those checks get recorded before anything is covered. Ask whether you will have access to it during the build.
And one last thing about the contract, a less pleasant one. Even a good contract does not protect you from everything. In serious trouble it will not solve the problem here and now; at most it will let you recover money years later, because the courts are slow, and by the time there is a judgment there is sometimes nobody left to recover it from. You need the contract, and it can save your skin. Just do not count on it to replace the choice: choose well first, then sign.
What I do not promise – and what this list does not cover
I do not promise that after checking all four things you will be left with certainty. The paperwork confirms the company exists. The people and the way of working show how it builds. References tell you how it built for someone else, and someone it chose itself. No list catches everything; at the end there is still a bit of luck involved. For me too.
There are also questions to which I myself have to answer “no”, and I would rather say so now than have it discovered at the table. I will not show you photographs of other people’s houses, because I promised their owners that nobody would see them; you will see what the owners agree to, in conversation. I will not give you a price at the first meeting, because I do not know it yet. And I will not start straight away, because I start one build a year – otherwise I would not be on site when it matters. If those are disqualifying points on your list, I have saved you some time already.
And one more thing, about how to check as the build goes on. You have every right to inspect your own build, and often. Just settle at the start who checks what, and when, or every inspection will turn into a misunderstanding. Once you have chosen someone, give him some trust – and check in a way that does not make him feel you take him for a bungler.
What to ask every contractor – me included
Ask these questions of everyone you talk to about building a residence, me included. I hire people too – subcontractors – and with them exactly the same warning lights go on for me.
- Who will be the site manager on my build, is he your employee, and how often will he be on site?
- How many builds are you running at the same time, and who will physically be on mine?
- How will you react if I hire my own supervision inspector from day one?
- Who will do the structure, the roof and the services, how many years have you worked with them, and when did you last take someone off a build?
- Who looks at what, and when, between the formal sign-offs, before a stage gets covered up?
- Where will the price come from, when will I hear it, and in which document will we write down what it includes and what it does not?
- How do changes get in, who pays for a workmanship error, and do I pay for signed-off stages or by calendar dates?
- Where and how often will I hear what is going on, and will I have access to the construction log as we go?
- Which of your previous investors can I talk to, and which architect who has worked with you?
- What serious problems have you had on your builds, and what did you do about them?
The answers that end a conversation with a subcontractor for me: a price off the top of his head before he has seen the drawings; changes priced “by eye, as we go”; reluctance to let someone on my side look at his work while it is in progress; and a large advance with no link to what is to be done for it. With a house builder they work exactly the same way.
The questions about working with me – from budget, through the team and references, to how I settle accounts – I answer in the Questions section.
Frequently asked questions
How do I vet a builder if I know nothing about building?
Leave the technical side to the professionals; you judge the answers. You ask who checks what and when, where the price comes from, how changes get in and where your information will come from – and you listen for whether you get specifics or assurances. The company’s paperwork goes to your advisor, the contract to your lawyer, the assessment of detailing to your architect. What is left for you is a conversation with a previous investor and a visit to a live site, and common sense is enough for both.
What does checking a Polish building company in the court register (KRS) tell me?
The extract shows who represents the firm, since when it has existed and whether insolvency or restructuring proceedings have been brought against it; for a company, there are also the public financial statements, from which an advisor can judge whether the firm has the means to run a build. It does not tell you whether the firm builds well, or whether it has debts nobody has entered in a register. The court register tells you whether the firm exists and gives your advisor clues about its finances; whether it builds well – it does not.
Do I need an owner’s supervision inspector when building a house in Poland?
For a house the law usually does not require one – the authority can impose that obligation in the building permit – but for a residence I would have one regardless. The inspector represents you: he checks quality and materials, signs off work before it is covered, can order work uncovered if it was covered without him, and at your request checks the accounts as well. He cannot be the same person as the site manager. The contractor’s reaction to the news that you will hire your own inspector is, in itself, an answer to part of your questions.
Can a contractor refuse to show previous projects?
Yes, and with residences he should, if he promised the owners discretion. Instead of photographs and addresses you have three other routes: a conversation with a previous investor, with that person’s consent; a visit to a live site; and a conversation with an architect who has worked with the contractor. If you are given none of these three, discretion stops being an explanation.
If you would like to put these questions to me in person – you are welcome. Let’s talk about your project.