A lot of people get uneasy when they see or hear about contracts, they immediately frown upon it due to the fear of the formality and daunting legal impression of it. The usual response of clients who don't want contracts between them and a professional is that they are very confident that nothing wrong will happen or that it brings tension to the discussions and the relationship. This mindset is so outdated and primitive that there are still so many, including well-educated people, who opt not to have written contracts when hiring designers and builders, this is also a reason that many people fear hiring an architect, they fear that they would be trapped in it and that architects want them to be trapped in signing one. In my experience, people who don't want to work with contracts are not serious clients or are not yet ready to engage in our professional service. In any case, as professionals, we would rather pass on a project that has no real security and good faith in a client.
People who are most likely to fail at negotiations and secure themselves from getting into bad investments are the ones who only deal with verbal agreements and are easy to trust with other people. This mindset is the most vulnerable type of people to con artists or scammers. Contracts or written agreements between two or more parties are very daunting indeed for first-timers but if you've learned anything from life, you never know what could happen when bad things happen and you won't have proof to claim anything from any deal. Dealing with design and construction services is not as simple as buying a fish in the market that you can purchase without contracts or receipts. Service providers promise things and you also promise to pay once the terms are fulfilled, hence, contracts are necessary to protect both you and the service provider in case the agreed terms are not being met a win-win arrangement.
Clients who want a service provider to work without any form of contract are usually the same people who engage in the mediocre services of unlicensed practitioners to save on cost. These unlicensed practitioners or illegal practitioners will not charge for professional liabilities and will not take on the risk because, in the eyes of the law, they don't exist as legitimate service providers. Without any form of contract that spells out specific terms for payment, manner of delivery and other important conditions, any project without it will operate in the dark with no clear understanding of expectations, responsibilities, and obligations and will inevitably result to confusions and the erosion of relationships when problems start to surface in the project. If you don't want to operate under this type of informal and insecure service arrangement and fail miserably in your project, you must recognize the practicality of having a well thought and written contract document that will not only symbolize both party's good faith in the project but will help guide a well-defined project and keep a healthy relationship with your service provider.
Now that you have realized the value of engaging architects or service providers with contracts, what do contracts contain, and how can contracts actually do you a favor?
In an Owner-Architect Contract or sometimes called Service Agreement or even Service Proposal, the architect will define the basic description of the project, sometimes the contract will set proper definitions of terminologies for clarity, the service process to guide you with the execution of the project, the terms, and manner of payment with the computation or statement of the service fee or cost, the scope of the project that the architect will only work on, some other conditions of the agreement that needs to be spelled and where you can both sign if you agree to everything written or suggested on it.
You can avoid arguing just by presenting the terms of the contract that has been breached and demand the other party to follow the agreement. In any case that any one of the signing parties did not fulfill their obligation according to the terms of the contract and is unwilling to fulfill it, the offended party can take legal action to claim damages or other remedies like arbitration or intermediaries outside of court.
The case (image) below is an extreme example of a failed project without any contract that a couple commissioned but failed to engage the services of professionals, the cost-conscious couple thought they could save money but ends up being abandoned by her husband's friend who was said to be a construction foreman, now thought to have run away and never to be seen again. The pain of losing your life savings from a huge mistake like this can happen when you trust untrained persons in the practice of architectural and engineering design and worst without any form of a written contract. As a general tip in every project or purchase that involves large sums of money, you need to make sure that you are protected with a legally binding contract no matter who you are dealing with. The small amount of paying for the right services to secure your big expense is worth the investment to ensure your peace of mind and reap the real fruits of your hard-earned money in the end.
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This project was designed and built by a foreman who didn't know how to design a proper structure suitable to the site.Read other articles:
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