Watch Out For Hidden Fee's When Hiring a Custom Home Builder

Watch out for hidden fees when hiring a custom home builder

When you are looking for a custom home builder you need to ask them what they are going to charge you to manage the building of your home. They will tell you what there fee to build the home are to be, it could be a fixed number, fixed percentage, a floating percentage or a floating fee. All of those are normal ways for custom home builders to bill for their services.

What you need to look at is what you are actually getting for that fee. Some custom home builders have been quoting a fee for building the home and once you have a agreed to it they then tell you that to have a supervisor on your site it will cost you thousands of dollars more depending on the size and scale of the home that you want to build.

You need to ask your potential builder what exactly the management fee entails and what it doesn’t entail. This will be the key; some builders will look less expensive because they are not giving you the service that you would expect with a management fee.

What you need to understand about hiring a custom home builder is that they aren’t just organizing the building of the home they are also organizing you the homeowner. You have so many decisions to make and bills to pay that you actually will affect the length of time that it takes to build the home more than the builder will. Every decision that you take a long time to make has the ability to slow the progress of the home down.

Because you are building a custom home you actually get to choose every single thing in the home.

Your house plans are a good start at this but they can only take the builder so far, at some point usually fairly early on in the building process they will start asking you questions about what you would like for this or that or if you want to change something now that you have seen it built (like the position of interior walls) instead of just on a page with lines on it.

It is routine for custom home builders on larger projects to charge a management fee and then bill out for an onsite supervisor, these supervisors are there to help not only the build process but also to help you the homeowner with all your decisions.  You should be able to find out before the build starts from your builder if they are billing out this way, it shouldn’t come as a surprise at a later date.

So remember that the more questions that you can ask the better you will be able to make the right decision pertaining to the selection of your new home builder.

Rob Abbott
Village Builders Inc.