The completion date has moved: how bad is it

A completion date that moves once, with a cause given, happens on healthy projects. A date that moves a second time, or a site where the rate of work has flattened while instalments keep falling due, is a different signal. What tells the two apart is whether the pace of construction actually recorded on site supports the new date.

What a moving date does and does not tell you

Delay by itself is not evidence of trouble. Permits, weather and supply move dates on perfectly healthy projects, and a developer who revises once with a stated cause is behaving normally.

What matters is whether the pace of actual work supports the new date. A revised date with no change in the rate of construction is not a forecast, it is a hope with a number on it, and it will move again.

The second thing worth watching is whether payments have kept pace while work has not. A gap that keeps widening month after month means instalments are being triggered by dates or assertions rather than by work.

What the report contains at this point

The report is the same product at every stage of a purchase, and it costs the same. What changes is what it is filled with, and after a completion date has moved the report leads with the list below.

• Photographs carrying the day they were taken
• A written note on what they show, in your language
• What the contract says should be there by now, set against what was found
• A completion range, where the building allows one to be given

What to establish first

Useful whether or not you order anything from us. If the developer answers all of it in writing, you have what you needed and we are not required.

1. Find the completion date in the contract and the clause that governs changing it.
2. Check whether your contract has liquidated damages for late delivery. Many do; most buyers never look.
3. Write down every date the developer has given you and when they gave it. The sequence is the evidence.
4. Get pace measured. One visit gives a snapshot; three give a rate, and a rate is what a forecast can be built from.

One revision with a stated cause is ordinary. A second one, or a gap between what has been paid and what has been built that keeps widening, is worth measuring rather than accepting. The sequence of dates you were given and the pace recorded on site are what a completion range rests on; a single date is not.