I'd like to take on one of the most common assumptions in home building head on: that a builder should hand you a detailed, accurate quote for free.
I understand where the assumption comes from. You are about to spend a great deal of money. It feels reasonable to expect a builder to put in the work to win the job.
The problem is that producing an accurate quote for a custom new home is not a half-hour exercise. Done properly, it involves a site visit, a soil test, a contour survey, a review of the plans, consultation with engineers, surveyors and certifiers, a bill of quantities, and a careful pass over your inclusions schedule so that every fitting and finish has a real number against it.
That is days of professional work, not minutes. A builder who gives that away for free has to recover the cost somewhere — usually by being vague enough that there is plenty of room for variations later. The "free quote" almost always becomes the most expensive quote by the end of the job.
What you actually want is the opposite. You want a builder willing to charge a fair fee for the preliminary work, because that fee buys you a quote you can trust, with very few prime cost and provisional sum items left to drift. A quote where everything is properly priced and your inclusions are real, not placeholders. A quote you can compare like-for-like with another builder, instead of guessing which one is hiding what.
A few things to look for in the quote itself:
Is there a proper inclusions schedule, with named products and quantities?
Are the prime costs and provisional sums sensible, or unrealistically low?
Does it include site costs based on actual investigation, not a square-metre rate?
Is anything important missing — connection of services, rainwater tank, retaining walls?
Treating the quoting stage as something worth paying for is one of the strongest things you can do to keep your project on budget.
If you'd like to see what a proper preliminary process looks like for energy efficient homes, visit inh.com.au/EnergySmart.
