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One thing that concerns many consumers when they’re building a new home is whether or not they are over paying for their home.
Unfortunately, some builders are giving the industry a bad name by over-bloating their contracts and misleading consumers.
Price should never be the determining factor when choosing a builder but sometimes it’s hard to see the signs that your builder is overinflating the price of your contract.
Which is why I am going to share three things that you need to know in order to avoid overpaying for your custom home.
Display Homes Are A Red Flag
My first tip is to always see a display home as a red flag.
When a builder has a display home, this immediately indicates that they are building homes at volume from a range of cookie-cutter designs.
As a rule: If a builder has a display home, they’re not a custom home builder.
It’s not only the large budget volume builders who use display homes either, luxury builders who use status to sign up clients also have display homes.
These builders disguise themselves as superior custom home builders and often charge extortionate prices for their builds because they’ve created a reputation for themselves as the high end, upper class builder of choice.
The problem is that these builders are operating the same schemes as the low end volume builders by working from a plan range, rather than building their clients a brand new, unique custom home.
Professional custom home builders build custom homes. Their homes are specifically designed for their clients and aren’t based on a display home that hundreds of other clients have replicated.
Volume builders, both budget and luxury, use their display homes to shortcut the design phase, but still end up having to charge their clients more than custom home builders for their services due to their inflated overheads.
If you don’t want to overpay for your custom home, you should see a display home as a warning sign, and consult a custom home builder who will start from scratch to create your dream home that meets your budget.
Be Wary Of Salespeople
My second tip is to be careful of salespeople.
Volume builders, both budget and luxury, employ salespeople to sell their display home packages to consumers using all the usual sales tactics.
These salespeople tend to have an air of arrogance about them because they have been successful in signing up volumes of people by underquoting the true price of a build in order to draw prospects in.
These companies have a good history of sales because they hire salespeople to underestimate the price and timeline of the build in order to get clients to sign on the dotted line.
The more times that these tactics work, the more arrogant the sales people become.
Professional builders like Stannard Family Homes take the opposite approach. We don’t employ generic sales people to engage with our clients, we have a team of professional builders, supervisors, pre-construction managers, project coordinators and custom home specialists to work with you through the entire process to bring your dream to life.
We don’t base our experience on the history of our sales but rather on what clients have to say about us.
Our team is only as good as the experience of our last customer, and we are constantly refining and improving our processes to ensure our clients become raving fans.
Value > Status
My third tip is to always choose value over status.
Budget volume builders use display homes and the quantity of homes they have built to build their reputation and create hype around their services, even if it means deceiving their clients in order to sign them up.
Expensive or ‘luxury’ volume builders use their name and drive high end cars to give the impression that building with them elevates your status, however it's the quality of the build rather than the label that determines its value in the long term.
At Stannard Family Homes, our priority is to provide you with the best service and value for your money while we build your unique custom home.
Professional builders are there to be just that. Professional builders. They aren’t there to mislead people in order to hit their sales targets or to use status symbols in order to give their services a higher perceived value.
It's important to do your research and find a builder that you can trust who will take into account your individual circumstances and budget.
Which is why I’ve put together a quick guide for you to download - The 7 Things You Must Know Before Designing A New Home.
It’s completely free, and it will help you to avoid any nasty surprises that can sneak up on you when building a custom home.
Just click on the link below and let me know the email address you'd like me to send it to.
