What’s up, everybody, by the end of this video, you’ll know exactly what to avoid while building your new custom home. I’m Jonathan. This is my beautiful wife, Rachel, and it starts now. So the home building process is extremely rewarding, particularly once it’s complete, however, the burn itself, the journey can be really long, expensive and tedious. If you don’t avoid these fatal mistakes. In all of our years that we’ve been helping people build homes as well as building our own homes. You could definitely say that we have some best practices and really good to do’s that we could share. But in this video, we’re talking explicitly about what to avoid so you can avoid these horrible, terrible, costly, stressful mistakes. So your home is one of the biggest investments you’ll ever make.
Choosing A Poor Location
So it’s crucial that you be prepared before construction because once that first scoop of ground is dug up, it’s really almost impossible to go backwards and throw the project in reverse. So what’s the first mistake to avoid? Choosing a poor location. The wrong location can mean a lot of things, depending on your needs and your lifestyle. Things like having a longer daily commute, for example, or what’s worse over building for a particular area and its economics. So, for example, if you build an 800,000 dollar house in an area where nothing has sold over 600,000 in a several mile radius, you’re likely over developing your home for that particular neighborhood’s economic climate. Or, for example, if you pick a lot on a busy street, you may have to deal with traffic noise.
You may have to do with a lot of foot traffic, and it might actually be difficult finding a buyer should you ever want to list and sell that home at a later date. So the best way to avoid the location mistake is do really good research upfront from the neighborhood to where it’s located in the neighborhood. Driving your path to work, you should find out everything you possibly can about the piece of property before you buy it or before your builder buys it on your behalf. Yeah, totally.
Deed Restrictions
And here’s another tip Just like picking a poor location, not reviewing the possible deed, restrictions of that particular piece of land beforehand is something once construction has started. There’s nothing really you could do about that. You may find yourself restricted that you can’t have a certain color of your front door or a number of cars, or the type of cars or vehicles in front of your home. Maybe there’s even restrictions on pets like, OK, so our best friends moved into a neighborhood and they had a family of ducks. I mean, gosh, you guys ducks when they’re babies are so cute, they grow up and they become really big ducks. Just so, you know, this particular neighborhood had a restriction, and you could not have duck ducks as a pet in this neighborhood. So they had to give up their family pets. It was always that duck. They couldn’t, couldn’t have duck. They couldn’t ducks. Was that his name Duck? No, the duck. So make sure you know what those deed restrictions are. So you’re not surprised later and you can’t do the things with your property that you want it. Yeah, for sure. Always ask for a copy of the deed restrictions if they exist is a good tip. Now let’s talk about budget.
Budget
So when building a custom home, you really have all of the freedom in the world to build whatever you want, and it’s really fun and it’s limitless. And if you have a good imagination, it gets like extremely limitless because all the lids are gone. Anything’s possible, and a good custom builder will gladly tell you that just about anything is possible. We’ve seen it all. We’ve had clients who built a basketball court.
I’ve seen a 2000 square foot wine cellar. We’ve seen home theaters with like theater seating where it’s elevated. It’s really cool. Panic room. We’ve seen panic rooms, you know, hidden safes behind the wall, all kind of cool stuff. And so building is really fun. And like we said, it’s rewarding because you get to build exactly what you want the first time on the front end and no one has ever lived in it. However, here’s the catch. There’s one factor that controls everyone’s dream home, and that’s their budget. Your imagination can only go as far as your qualification will take you. So the big mistake we see people committing here is setting an unrealistic budget in conjunction with their expectations of the home. If your dream home isn’t consistent with what you’re either able or willing to invest in it, you may find yourself trying to cut quality of construction or making compromises on things that are really important to you because you’re trying to squeeze a round peg into a square hole
Or maybe you start asking two different builders to price compete, which can actually bite you in the butt if you only choose a builder based on price alone. That’s actually there’s a free extra tip for you. Don’t necessarily just go with the cheapest builder because these are the cheapest builder. And frankly, for us as brokers, this is one of the harder parts of our job because we love helping people map out their dream home, like imagining the process of imagining what your daughter’s closet is going to be and how big your son’s bedroom is going to be, and all those little dreaming things that go into you and you build up these expectations. Sometimes if you haven’t done work on the front end to get familiar with what your budget will translate into a home, we have to come in and be the wet blanket to try to get you back into reality, and we hate doing that. So don’t make us do that to you. When planning a home, please, we want the sky to be the limit, but we definitely want to encourage you to get your budget squared away from the outset because we don’t want you to either be house rich and cash poor or have to have the bubble burst before you even get started, because it’s just really sad to see the disappointment in people faces.
Unprepared Upgrades
True, another mistake we see people running into, particularly in that like five-to-900,000-dollar range is being unprepared for overages or upgrades that you end up really, really wanting throughout the process. So like, OK, we had a really good budget when we were building our home 725. It’s an awesome budget, however. Well, that’s the thing is, people in this six to 900 k, they feel like they can afford a ton. It’s a decent budget compared to some budgets, but the reality is well you tell them the reality, like we’re building our house than we think of things that we want, like a home theater with invisible speakers. I mean, who doesn’t want that?
Or there are small things, even like a beautiful pantry door. So there were things that came along the way that we just had to have like a hot tub and your 10,000 dollar deck and that too. Yeah. So there’s things that come along the way that you have to have and they become a have to have because you’ve dreamt about this now for years sometimes. And you want to make sure that you have a budget and you have an overage budget in place so that you are ready for those things. So it’s called a contingency fund or just maybe some money stuck in savings. And you know, it’s there for a rainy day. Yeah, I mean, I would say a 10% budget is not unreasonable. So if you’re going into an 800,000 dollar bill, you should have 70 $80,000 ready to spend on upgrades because it’s invariably going to happen. There’s just so many cool things out there and put in at home. So, cause Pinterest. Yeah, so that’s budget.
Final Thoughts
I’ll leave you with one other parting thought. It’s a quote from Benjamin Franklin, one of our founding fathers. It’s a lot of F’s alliteration aside, my dear, he said. The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten. So we talked just briefly about this earlier. But not all builders are the same. Even builders that are the same price range may not be the same. Some may be less experienced and they may have a smaller capacity or others may be have a lot more experience. And they know exactly what they’ve been doing because they’ve been in the business with their family for 50 years. So we actually made an entire different video on how to select a custom builder. So if you’re interested, go check that one out. But the main thing you need to do is check out their portfolio and ask to walk one or more of their homes of prior clients.
That way, you get to see what their capacity is in their product, as well as see if their past clients are happy. Thanks for watching this video. I hope it was helpful and informative. Please hit the Subscribe button and feel free to comment. If you’ve run into some mistakes that we didn’t mention here, feel free to comment as well. I’m Jonathan, this is Rachel. We’re ThatFitTeam professionals in real estate and passionate about people. See you soon.
