Monday, March 08, 2010

Construction Contracts Get Complicated

Venture onto your state’s licensing board website and you’re bound to stumble on a list of the recently punished. It’s made up of contractors who’ve been found guilty of contracting sins, such as substandard workmanship, working without a license, attempting to defraud customers, or not providing the required notices in their contracts.

It seems many states have recently adopted new consumer protection policies that require the contractor to hand the customer addendums, attachments and small flyers that educate the homeowner on what’s required of the contractor. Forget these extra pages in your contract, and you chance tangling with the state licensing board for a contract violation.

Each state has different rules on what they require. Some states are much more stringent then others. Nevada has extremely strict contract requirements for swimming pools and spas. Texas requires that contractors deliver a two-page disclosure statement before the contract is signed. Pennsylvania's Home Improvement Consumer Protection Act requires that a long list of disclosures appear in the contract – like start and finish dates, names and addresses of subs, insurance coverage, and a phone number for the Pennsylvania Bureau of Consumer Protection. Florida requires you include the Homeowner’s Construction Industry Recovery Fund notice in your contract, or risk a $500 fine. In California, forget to include disclosures on your insurance, and you risk discipline by the Contractor’s State License Board.

Each state now has its own unique, and sometimes peculiar, contract requirements. If you use a pre-made contract form and don’t include your state’s requirements, you might get away with it for a while. But if a disagreement occurs (and eventually one will), you’ll be sorry that you didn’t use a good, legal contract – especially since you can now make one in minutes, for less than what you’d spend on one excruciating visit to a lawyer’s office.

And, you don’t have to know contract law to draft a good contract. Construction Contract Writer walks you through the process. Leave something important out, and the program reminds you why it’s important for your state. Can’t decide what choice to make? The program explains the results of your choices – making it clear.

Download the program and create hundreds of contracts. Keep them on file. Print them out. Save them as PDFs and e-mail them. The Construction Contract Writer program includes free updates for one year. You can subscribe to future updates for only $25 a year to keep your contracts current with your state’s laws. State laws do change (and rather abruptly). To stay in compliance, your contracts should change also.
If all this makes you twitch with legal unease, at least download the trial program for your state. It has all the features of the real program – it just has the print function disabled. Try it and see if this program isn’t all that it’s touted to be. With the trial download, there’s a promotion code that will save you 15% should you decide to buy the program. And here’s a secret: That promo code is good for 15% savings on anything listed on the Craftsman web site.

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