Living in a rural area, I have found Telstra really makes a genuine effort to ensure our coverage and if there are any problems they are happy to apply credits to our bills. One cannot really ask for more.

In 2018 I entered into a design agreement with Ryan Designer Homes in which they would assist us in the design of our new home in the Sunshine Coast Hinterland, while also arranging all necessary surveys and reports on our property in order to achieve building approval. The agreed cost was $35,000 - any additional costs would be justified and confirmed before hand.
The design fees quickly ballooned to almost $50,000. When attempting to uncover where all the money had gone, here is just some of what we found:
The first invoice was $1,000 higher than agreed, and with it came an email stating, “the [survey] quote is more than we factored in for our Stage 1 Preliminary Agreement, so I’ll adjust next inovice accordingly”. The cost increases then just continued. No evidence of expenditure or the allowances that were originally factored in. And this type of behaviour continued throughout the design process.
I was charged $3,000 for a Quantity Survey that Ryan Designer Homes first refused to show me before ultimately being forced to admit that it was never obtained. They also refuse to refund the fee.
I was charged $2,700 for a front boundary survey. Upon demanding evidence of this highly excessive expense, Ryan Designer Homes was reissued the invoice and conceded that the invoice contained unauthorised and undisclosed fee - ‘RDH attendance at survey $220’. This fee was not authorised by myself and may be why it wasn't disclosed in the first instance. We uncovered other evidence of undisclosed fees to inflate invoices.
I was charged $5,000 for the services of a Private Building Certifier to obtain a building approval, but no building approval or permit was received. This cost was not even disclosed in the design agreement.
Things worsened when I was charged for Architectural Plans and only received an incomplete set of Builder’s Pricing Plans. To get the rest of the plans I had to pay an extra $5,500 but only received an incomplete set of Construction Plans. Ryan Designer Homes continues to refuse to provide us with a full copy of the plans we paid for in full.
Ryan Designer Homes attempted to justify some of the total expenditure by forwarding to me a quote, claimed to be from the house designer for my project. It was a simple table totalling $22,000. The document did not contain the designer’s company name, ABN, address, contact details, quote number or anything remotely similar. It didn’t even contain any details about the address or property to which it applied, nor was it addressed to anybody. Strangely, it was sent in Word document format, and upon checking the document properties, the document creator and author was a Ryan Designer Homes employee who sent the document. This was not a legitimate quote.
Ryan Designer Homes was very careful to withhold from us the estimated construction cost of the home once the design was completed. What they did produce was a tender to construct a gravel driveway, earthworks for the house pad and septic system, for the price of $189,527. We were required to commit to this tender before a building contract was produced and the cost of the construction revealed because this tender contained excavation of the house site as well. We naturally rejected this tender (as we found companies prepared to do the same work for approximately $50,000 cheaper).
After rejecting thee tender, Ryan Designer Homes actively and deliberately withheld our driveway engineering plans from us.
In an even further dubious move, Ryan Designer Homes attempted to get us to pay the QBCC insurance levies which are based on the value of the building contract - without producing a building contract. These fees amount to about $20,000 and are often included in the building contract. We remain very concerned that this was an attempt to coerce us into a financial arrangement in which we were obligated to commit to a building contract with Ryan Designer Homes in which they could dictate the terms and price of the building contract at a later date.
Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the contract with Ryan Designer Homes was that they used our approx $50,000 to purchase all our plans, surveys and reports in their own name and then claim legal ownership of them. Access to these documents was withheld unless we entered into a building contract with them - which hadn't been priced or disclosed. Make of that what you will.
We now have someone else building our home but for the reasons outlined above, I cannot recommend the services of Ryan Designer Homes to anyone looking to build a new house.