Picture this: you ring three builders to come and quote your new home. Two say they'll do you a free quote, fast. One says they charge a fee for a proper preliminary service and detailed quotation. Most people thank the third one for their time and go with one of the free quoters. I get it — who wants to pay for a piece of paper before they've signed anything?
But here's the bit that took me a long time to learn, and I want to save you the lesson: a free quote is almost always a guess. A proper one isn't.
To put together a real quote on a custom new home, somebody has to sit down and work through every line of your project. They need to look at the plans, the engineering, the soil report. They need to count up the materials — every metre of timber, every door, every tap, every square metre of tile. They need to ring around suppliers and trades to lock in real prices. They need to assess your block — slope, access, services, the lot. That work takes weeks, not minutes. And it costs money to do.
So when a builder hands you a free quote on the spot, what you've actually got is a square-metre-rate estimate dressed up to look like a quote. It might be in the right ballpark or it might be wildly off. You won't know until the variations start landing. And if the builder used the cheapest possible allowances on every prime cost item to make their number look good against the competition, you'll find out the hard way once you start choosing tiles and bench tops.
The detailed quote you pay for, on the other hand, is built on a proper bill of quantities and accurate inclusions schedule. It's the version of the cost you can actually trust. Spending a bit up front on a real quote is the cheapest insurance policy you can buy on a project of this size.
If you'd like a Brisbane South builder who'll do the work properly and tell you the real number — not the number that wins the job — I'd be glad to chat.
