When we work with families to build them a $120K custom home, I often find that they didn't think they could afford a custom house.
Even if they thought they could swing it financially, they worried that a custom builder wouldn't want to touch a new home project that wasn't at least a few hundred thousand dollars.
Unfortunately, these families were reading the industry fairly accurately. A lot of custom builders shy away from building these more affordable homes (for a variety of reasons). But that's not the way we work.
We're not afraid to build a $120K custom home. My dad always says, it's harder to build a home for a hundred thousand dollars than one for half a million.
Why is that?
There's no room for error at $120K. You have to be efficient, diligent, and organized. You have to plan everything in advance and think through every contingency. You have to know your customer extremely well. If you goof up more than just a little bit, there goes your profit—and you won't last long as a builder.
We like to say that we build a house seven times on paper before we build it in real life. That level of planning means that any mistakes or kinks in the building plan get worked out on paper, and not while building a client's home.
That eliminates all kinds of waste, from labor waste, to material waste, to time waste. Managing our materials and schedules efficiently means that we can build a custom home affordably. And our comprehensive upfront planning means that our customer is not the guinea pig for a plan before we build their home.
I learned those kinds of techniques from my dad, who has successfully built homes ranging in price from $50K to over half a million dollars over the last 52 years. In the last seventeen years, I've refined those techniques. I apply the efficient best practices you need to build a $120K home to homes in the $200-600K range.
Here's the payoff for our clients, across the board: no matter what your budget is, you get more home than you expected because of the efficient practices we've refined over the last half century.
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