What a turnkey contract actually covers

The word is doing too much work

"Turnkey" is used loosely in Malta. It appears in property listings, in agents' descriptions, in conversations at the notary, and it does not always mean the same thing twice. Sometimes it means finished. Sometimes it means finished and furnished. Sometimes it means the seller has put down tiles and stopped.

In a contracting context it means something narrower and more useful: a prime contract. One agreement covering the works, one invoice stream, one party accountable for the result. It is a statement about who carries the coordination risk, not a promise about what furniture arrives.

That distinction matters most to people who have just bought in shell form, which is the normal way property is sold here. A shell is structure, openings and services stubbed in. Everything that makes it habitable is still ahead of you, and it is not one job. It is many jobs that have to happen in a particular order.

What is inside the contract

Our services page lists 22 services and project types we deliver. They sit under a single contract. That is the whole point of the structure: you are not signing 22 things.

No single property uses all 22. A two-bedroom apartment in shell form draws on a subset; a townhouse conversion draws on a different subset; a commercial fit-out draws on another. The scope document for your property says which ones apply. What the number tells you is the range that can sit inside one agreement rather than being handed back to you as your problem.

Our budget calculator works at a finer grain. It breaks a fit-out into ten trade lines, each with its own published rate, so you can assemble a budget from the parts before anyone has visited the property. Those rates are on the calculator page. Use the figures there — not a number someone repeated to you, and not a rounded version of one.

Ten trades on one apartment is not unusual. It is ordinary. And ten trades is the exact scale at which the coordination problem becomes real.

The specific thing you stop doing

Here is what separate trade contracts look like in practice.

The tiler arrives and cannot start, because first fix is not complete in the bathroom. He is right. He leaves and takes the next job, which runs three weeks. The electrician is now finished and wants paying, and he is also right. The kitchen was measured against a wall that has since been furred out. Nobody lied to you. Every individual trade did exactly what they were contracted to do, and the gaps between them — the sequencing, the tolerances, the fact that one trade's finished work is the next trade's starting condition — belonged to nobody.

They belonged to you. That is the default position when you hold ten contracts.

Under a prime contract, the interface between one trade and the next is inside the contract rather than between contracts. When the tiler cannot start, that is not a conversation you have. It does not generate a decision you need to make from London on a Tuesday afternoon.

This is the single substantive thing a turnkey arrangement buys. Everything else — the invoice, the contact — is administration. The coordination is the product.

One invoice, one point of contact

The commercial version of the same idea. One contract produces one invoice stream rather than ten, which means one set of payment discussions and one reconciliation at the end. One point of contact means one number to call regardless of which of the ten trades is currently on site.

For overseas buyers this is usually the practical driver. If you are in Malta three weekends a year, ten relationships is not a workload you can carry, and the deficit shows up as delay rather than as a visible argument.

What the sources here do not settle

This article is built from two sources: our services list and our calculator's rate card. They establish scope and rates. They do not establish a number of things a careful buyer will want in writing, and it is more useful to name them than to fill the space with assurances.

They do not establish who handles Planning Authority applications, or whether permits sit inside the contract sum or alongside it. Works to Maltese property can require permits, and the question of who applies, who pays the fees and who carries the delay if an application is refused should be answered in your contract, not inferred from a services page.

They do not establish how condominium consents are handled. If you have bought an apartment, works are bound by the condominium rules and by the deed. Access to common parts, use of the lift for materials, permitted working hours and noise restrictions are all live constraints, and none of them are established by either source here.

They do not establish anything about Gozo. Every delivery to a Gozo project crosses by ferry, and that is a real constraint on materials logistics, but whether it changes the contract commercially is not something these two sources answer.

They also do not establish programme duration, payment structure, defects liability after handover, or whether furniture falls inside a standard scope. Ask. All four are reasonable things to have written down before signing, and none of them are settled by the word "turnkey".

What you should still expect to do

A prime contract does not make you a spectator. You still choose finishes, and those choices sit on the critical path — a tile selected late is a trade standing idle. You still sign off variations. You still make the decisions that only the owner can make.

What changes is that the decisions arrive as decisions, framed and sequenced, rather than as ten trades independently discovering that you are unreachable.

Reading a turnkey offer

Whatever you are being offered, and by whom, the questions are the same:

1. Is this one contract, or several presented together?
2. Which services from the list apply to my property, and which do not?
3. Who is responsible when trade B cannot start because trade A is late?
4. Is the price fixed, or remeasured against actual quantities?
5. Who applies for permits, and who carries a refusal?
6. What happens after handover, and for how long?

Our services page answers the first two for our own scope. The calculator gives you the rates to build the budget. The rest belongs in your contract document, in writing, before you sign — which is true of any arrangement, and true regardless of what the word on the letterhead says.