Over the last 20 years as a Custom Home Builder, I have seen that the biggest problem facing people about to start planning the design of their Custom Home is that they don’t really know how much it will cost to build and,

being unable to get reliable, consistent (or believable) ball park estimates from Custom Home Builders, they tend to rely on the advertised pricing of large volume builders.

Those larger builders tend to supply standard 'cookie cutter' homes on flat blocks of land at a discount rate which means that if you apply their advertised 'rate' to your Preliminary Ballpark Estimate then your Custom Home Building budget runs serious risk of being way off target.

Consequently I have seen hundreds of drawings and specifications for Custom Homes come accross my desk that have been way overdesigned because clients and/or architects and/or designers have inadvertently used  a Preliminary Cost Estimate that is simply too low to achieve your design requirements.

Using a figure that is too low will mean that your concept drawings could easily run the risk of being overdesigned and as a result you may never get to build your home because you may not be able to afford it.

At the recent Melbourne Home Ideas show I spoke with many people who were in exactly this situation and in desperation they were hoping that our Custom Home Building process could save them enough money so that they could afford their new Home – a home that they had often been planning and designing for up to two years.

Sadly, while our unique Construction Management process can create significant cost savings over traditional Custom Home Building contracts, it was unlikely that even we would have been able to complete these projects anywhere near the required budget.  As you can understand, this is devastating for anyone in this position.

We have therefore implemented a new stage into our process which is a Preliminary Concept Estimate which for a very reasonable cost allows us to engage an independent Quantity Surveyor to give you the numbers you need to build your Custom Home.

You can now control the development (aka wishlist) of your Concept Drawings to keep them within your Preliminary Cost parameters and helping you to avoid great disappointment later.

In order to get started we will assist you to prepare a Concept Idea Sketch and a Short Specification so that we can give the Quantity Surveyor the broad information he requires.  From there we should have your costing ready in a matter of days so that you now have realistic, independent independent information to make the right decisions to move forward.

To see what you will get, then you can download a sample Preliminary Cost Estimate from this link.