Why Hire a Custom Home Builder?
As a veteran Custom Home Builder, one of the most common questions people have when buying a new home is whether they should self-contract their new home or hire a professional new home builder. It’s a great question and we hope the points below help you make your decision.
(Note: V2 Construction is a Custom Home Builder in Crystal Lake, IL serving the entire McHenry County and Northern Illinois area. Click here for more information: https://www.v2construction.net)
Most people who consider building a custom home on their own are thinking first and foremost about cost. And that’s a valid concern because the cost of building out a new custom home can be high and most people don’t want to spend any more than they have to. However, there’s a lot more to cost than you might realize.
Unless you have extensive experience building custom homes, it is very difficult to understand just how many factors go into cost. We’ll start with materials.
1) The Cost of Building a Custom Home - Materials
Materials are a major expense when building your new custom home. Every change you make to the construction plan, every revision, every surprise that comes up will cost you. Any time you thought one solution would work and then it ends up you need something different is going to cost you.
It’s very difficult to know exactly what materials and quantities you will need for a project. Even after talking to all your contractors, it may still be difficult to know because all the different contractors aren’t necessarily communicating with each other and anyway, it’s very hard to keep so many different estimates organized in your mind.
You also don’t know if some contractors are inflating their materials costs (which, unfortunately, is something that some less than reputable contractors will do when dealing with buyers who they can sense aren’t experienced).
This is why you want a full service custom home builder who can control material costs and manage all the different parties involved – which brings us to our next point.
2) The Cost of Building a Custom Home – Convenience or Confusion
Managing a new residential home build means dealing with many different contractors, suppliers, etc. It’s not unusual to be bombarded from 10-20 different directions in a single day. Are we on schedule with the framing? When is the bathroom getting completed? Will the siding team be able to work on Thursday because of the rain??? It’s constant and it’s too much for most people to handle – especially if you’re trying to manage everyone.
One of the big differences in working with an experienced Custom Home Builder like V2 Construction is that, with us, the owner is onsite every single day. He is talking to all the parties involved, keeping the project on schedule and being a single point of contact for every single thing you need to know about. Any time of day or night, you can call him to ask about any part of the project and you will get a clear, informed answer. No juggling people and conversations. For many people, this alone is enough to make them want to hire a professional custom home builder.
3) The Cost of Building a Custom Home – Time
When we talk about saving time by hiring a custom home builder, we mean a couple different things.
First, we know from experience that working with a professional builder means the project timeline gets estimated properly from the beginning and all involved parties are held 100% responsible for sticking to that timeline.
Our timelines are based on experience, not guessing or an architect’s estimate. There are many variables and things that could go wrong in a new custom home build and we have seen them all.
You have to remember that every month extra your project goes on is another month of finance charges, additional fees from the contractors, more cost from you having to stay wherever you are living leading up to moving into your new home. We’ve seen self-contractors add as much as 6-8 months of additional financing costs through improper time estimates.
As they say, time = money. So you want to get your new custom home built as quickly as possible (without cutting any corners of course).
Conclusion
Any way you slice it, getting a custom home built is going to be a substantial investment of your time and money. However, experience shows that using the right custom home builder can make all the difference and the expertise is well worth paying for. In fact, chances are your new home will end up costing you much less than if you contracted it yourself.
What’s been your experience? Leave a comment below and let us know about your experience.
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V2 Construction is a custom home builder in Crystal Lake, IL. We build gorgeous home additions, custom home remodeling and all forms of new residential construction. We also serve McHenry, Woodstock, Cary, Huntley, Algonquin, Barrington and all surrounding areas. Contact us if you would like to learn more.