Can I sue my builder/designer for missleading advice?

Hi

My partner and I engaged a builders/designer to help us with our development.

We initially went to him to help us design 2 dwellings in our 942sqm block.

After meeting with him, him inspecting the property, making preliminary talks to council, based on his experience dealding with this council, talks to real estate agents and personal view suggested we should have no problem getting approval for 3 x 3 bed dwellings.

So we agreed to proceed and paid him to commence desiging 3 x 3 bed dwellings. We paid him and 4 months later he had plans that we were happy with. We approved these plans, and 4 months later he presented the plans to council.

Council has rejected the plans because of 2 main issues – (1) The set-back suggeted by our builder/designer is way shorter than the regulations (4 metres), it should be double (8 metres). Objections two (2) is that all 3 bedroom dwellings need double garages and our dwellings only have a single garage.

These 2 objections make it impossible to have 3 x 3 bed dwellings as suggested by our builder/designer.

He is know suggesting we cut our losses and:

• Omit unit 3, and go ahead with 2 dwellings, (unit 1 and 2) and create double garages. (Which is what we suggested from the beginning, but he charged us more to design 3 units)

• Build up, so make second storage on units 1 or 2. (But as he said earlier in another conversation that that is not feasible as we wouldn’t recuperate the extra cost of building a second storage in Morwell)

• Make major design amendments to units 2 and 3, by deleting one bedroom on both of them and maybe leave unit one as, but he doesn’t think that will go through council. And making major work also means more money and time.

• Or simply cut our losses and take the design to a bigger land. Which is 100 sq bigger, that can give us approx 20 metres wide front and another 5 metre deep.

Do we have any compensation against false recommendations by our builder/designer? We were guided by his advace on the matter, as he had had preliminary discussions with council, has experience dealing with this council and has experience in the field.

We beleive he has waisted our time and money on a planning permit that was never going to  be accepted by council.

Can we sue him and recuperate the money invested in desingning these plans?

I would really appreciate your response.

Thanks