Designing your home: when should you engage a builder?

We believe the current model for finding the right builder is broken. When designing your home, you’re told you should shop around for 3-4 builders, send them some documents, and hopefully they all quote the same thing? You get the quotes back and you’re expected to understand all the jargon – and that’s if it’s itemised and detailed! But most aren’t. So you’re meant to interpret this information and fingers crossed everything is covered? The frustrating thing about this model is that a lot of clients just look at the bottom line, sometimes basing their decision purely on price, but that still doesn’t reflect that what the builder has quoted for is what you’re expecting.

The unfortunate truth is that unless your plans and documents detail every single item of the build, then it’s up to the builder to interpret them and provide you with a price. This is where builders can unintentionally miss things, and then comes all the variations during the build. Your budget starts to blow out, you’re taking on more pressure financially during the build. This is not ideal. In fact it’s really stressful for both parties.

Key considerations when designing your home

This is why we believe in early builder involvement when designing your home. This requires a significant amount of our time, and an investment from the clients, so we’re taken seriously as professionals that can provide detailed advice throughout the design phase. This way clients can make educated decisions about their budget and design direction. It’s much better for this to happen during the design phase, when it’s cheaper and easier to make changes. From there, you’ll be much more able to build on time, and on budget.

Your architect is great most of the time, but it’s actually not their profession to be providing you detailed pricing on the impact of the design. That would be like me telling clients not to worry and I’ll draw up the designs for them, I just wouldn’t do that, I stay in my lane. Let’s use cars as an example – we expect that the designers are talking to manufacturing, and manufacturing is talking to finances, and finances are talking to marketing, to ensure they’ve covered all elements of the build of the car. THEY WORK AS A TEAM. We consider the builder, architect, clients, consultants all a team! So lets start treating us as a big team.

So how do you choose the right builder?

More than the cost of the builder, you should base your decision on trust and the capabilities of this preliminary work, and of course, how they conduct themselves throughout construction. Ask your builder how will they manage conflicts? How do they manage variations? What software do they use? What support will you have throughout the build? Not all builders are the same. We all run different business models, so figure out what model they run.

These are serious questions you should be asking before you commit to a 6-18 month relationship of design and construction. Believe it or not, you develop a relationship with your builder, and not only do you want to be on the same page from the start, you’ve got to bloody like each other.