As Custom Home Builders and as part of the Construction Managers process we engage a Quantity Surveyor to help you to identify a realistic Preliminary Cost Estimate for your Custom Home Building project.

Your Preliminary Cost Estimate is made up of two parts, being:

1. What You can afford to spend, and
2. How much Custom Home You can afford for that amount

First, what can you afford to spend?  This is the key question and the only one that you really have any control over. 

If you are borrowing money for your Custom Home then you need to consult your bank or Financial institution to find out what they will actually loan to you.  In order to get a head start, you can download from here a simple Home Loan Calculator to get you started..remember to add your land as well if you need that too!

So, how much Custom Home can you afford for this loan amount?  This is the open ended question and before we get to it, we need to first remind ourselves about what is a Custom Home?

A Custom Home is a one off, unique design that will likely never ever be built again on any other site - ever...it is your home.

The alternative is what we know as a Project Home, being a mass produced, nationally advertised, volume builder, cookie cutter design and built to a price - we all know the brands!

So, do you think that your Custom Home will cost more to build than one of these mass produced project homes?  Yes, of course it will - but how much more will your builder charge to build a custom home? This is the question that you simply cannot answer until you have your Custom Home designed and specified and as you know, this in itself can be a very expensive process.

Over the years I have seen many, many people rush off to architects, engineers, designers etc only to come up with a Custom Home design that is so expensive to build that it well,...never gets built.

This is a devastating result for everyone and the main reason why we have put The Construction Managers process together.  That is, we have a step by step process to design your Custom Home to match and fit your affordable ballpark budget.

The first step in that process is to put together a Preliminary Concept Specification with a Preliminary Concept Sketch - on graph paper will do, so that we can then consult with a Quantity Surveyor so that he (or she!) can put a reasonable Preliminary Cost Estimate against your Concept Sketch Drawings.  Keep in mind, these are not any sort of working drawings, only basic sketches with general sizes only.

From this we engage a Quantity Surveyor who can give you a reasonable Preliminary Cost Estimate to ensure that you can proceed, knowing that you will be able to adequately finance the completion of your Custom Home.

Next step after that, we will continue our Construction Managers process and commence your Pre-Design report and develop your Sketch into a more detailed Concept Drawing so that we can start to Prepare your Cost Plan - the required precursor to our Construction Management process