Cultivating a thriving residential solar business involves so much more than installing solar equipment—it requires meticulous attention to the legal and logistical framework that underpins each project. At the heart of this framework lies the construction agreement, a cornerstone document that delineates the scope, timeline, and financial terms of the whole installation process.
In this excerpt from the new Customer Contracts & Agreements course, we hear from Chris Gordon, Corporate Counsel at ReVision Energy, about the indispensable role of construction agreements in residential solar projects, highlighting their significance in fostering clarity and accountability between solar professionals and their customers.
In this process of selling a solar system or other piece of technology or any construction agreement, there’s a lot of back and forth before we get to the construction agreement on price, how’s it going to look…sometimes maybe designs can change over the course of time.
The point of the construction agreement is to memorialize the final agreement between the customer and the contractor.
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It’s going to set forth the price.
What the contractor will do.
What equipment is going to be included.
So it kind of puts a cap on those beginning stages of selling a solar system and negotiation and brings it all into one agreement, so the parties are clear going forward from there who’s obligated for what and when. And it becomes the governing document from that point forward of the relationship between the parties.
That’s the primary point – to capture everything that you’ve talked about before that. Put it into one hopefully clear agreement that everybody understands and is comfortable with and then saying this is the final deal. This is what we’re going to do. What we’re going to pay. And how we’re going to approach different hurdles that might come up along the way after the agreement is signed.
From the contractor’s point of view, they want the price and the payment schedule in there for the customer. The customer’s primary obligation in these contracts is going to be to pay invoices as they come due. That’s what they’re agreeing to. They’re agreeing to pay the contractor for their work.
The contract will be heavier on the contractor’s obligations. It’ll outline the equipment that the contractor’s responsible for procuring to build the system. It’ll outline what permits and other agreements that might be necessary for solar, what’s included in the install, and what’s excluded from the install.
You want to set out those obligations at the beginning, so everyone’s clear. Okay…This is what the contractor is agreeing to do and also what the contractor is not agreeing to do and what’s not included in that price.
The primary obligations of the contractor will be the work to procure, design, and build the solar systems.
If you’d like to learn more about construction agreements, consider enrolling in the Customer Contracts & Agreements course.
