What Your Build Budget Actually Has To Cover

The single biggest reason builds blow up is people genuinely don't know what their money has to stretch over. They look at the headline construction figure and assume that's the build cost. It isn't. By the time you've added GST, council fees, consultants, site works on a sloping or filled block, demolition if you're knocking something down, landscaping, and the bits and pieces nobody mentions on day one, you can easily be 20–30% above the number you started with. So when someone tells me they've got, say, $750,000 for a 300m² home, I want to walk through the whole picture before we get excited. A standard build at $2,500 + GST per square metre is already $750k plus GST on its own. Add a sloping site, allow for landscaping and fencing at around 5%, throw in $20k for other consultants and approvals, and suddenly the realistic top line is over $1.1 million. Better to know that on day one than discover it after you've spent twenty grand on plans. Here's my honest advice: tell your builder exactly how much you've got. Don't keep it close to the chest. A decent home builder isn't going to inflate the price to that figure — they're going to tell you straight whether your wishlist fits, and where the give-and-take needs to happen. A free quote sounds great until it's wrong by a hundred grand. The other thing worth thinking about early is overcapitalisation. If this is your forever home on the Gold Coast, build the place you want to live in and stop worrying about resale. But if you're planning to move on in five years, be careful about putting the most expensive house on the street — those are always harder to sell. Different buyers want different things, so a thoughtful custom new home usually beats a copy-paste one when it comes time to list. If you'd like a realistic sit-down on what your budget can actually deliver before you commit, I'm at inh.com.au/goldcoast.