Escrow accounts for building work / Extension

WhiteBoardMarker

Has anyone ever used an escrow account or a company that provides this service for a kitchen extension? We are looking at the cost of around £120,000 for the extension, and the sensible option would be to have an agreement in place through an escrow to protect me and also guarantees the builder he gets his money after certain aspects of the build are completed. Thanks 

Hoenir

Employ a project manager and come to an arrangement with the builder regarding stage payments. 

tacpot12

ESCROW is better for larger projects. Yours would be a larger project to my mind. I've not used an ESCROW service for building work, but I've been recommending it for years. You will see enough horror stories just on MSE about building projects that have gone bad to know that even a good contract is sometimes not enough.

It takes a bit of thinking on how to be fair to both parties, and how to word the release critieria, but it's worth it for the peice of mind. It keeps the builder focused, but might cost you a little more if the builder has to pay the sub-contractors before they get paid themselves. Borrowing money is cheap, a bad builder isn't. 

DullGreyGuy

WhiteBoardMarker said:

Has anyone ever used an escrow account or a company that provides this service for a kitchen extension? We are looking at the cost of around £120,000 for the extension, and the sensible option would be to have an agreement in place through an escrow to protect me and also guarantees the builder he gets his money after certain aspects of the build are completed. Thanks 

Escrow isn't used much in the UK -v- other countries. Here we'd normally have staged payments with materials paid in advance and labour paid in arrears.

We do use escrow for other purposes, namely for holding software source code, when we buy a package and have the vendor customise it for us. Whilst they continue to trade we pay them annual licence fees and all is fine but were they to fold or decide to stop supporting the software etc we'll have spent millions on software that suddenly has no support. 

Has the builder suggested escrow or is this your idea?

Pollycat

Is it me being dim or is this thread on the wrong board?

EDIT:
Yes.
Originally posted on overseas travel board.

eddddy

DullGreyGuy said:

We do use escrow for other purposes, namely for holding software source code, when we buy a package and have the vendor customise it for us. Whilst they continue to trade we pay them annual licence fees and all is fine but were they to fold or decide to stop supporting the software etc we'll have spent millions on software that suddenly has no support. 

This is going way off the OP's topic - but some years ago, the CTO of a software company said to me that they bung a pile of source code into escrow, but the escrow company have no way of checking what they've been given, and he didn't believe that anyone unfamiliar with the source code could take a pile of raw source code and rebuild the application anyway.

(But having escrow kept the customers happy!)