Custom Home Building Vancouver

by | Oct 4, 2012 | EXLE Blog

Custom Home Building in Vancouver is as hot as our luxury housing market.

A Custom Home is built to suit the specific needs of the home owner’s wants and desires. With that said, building a custom dream home requires your direct involvement from the design, planning and construction stages all the way through to the final interior design selections.

How aware prospective new home owners are of this required involvement? One thing is for certain, this should be one of the major considerations to ponder when deciding to build a new home.

What are the alternatives?
Not all new homes are custom built nor entail the huge commitment in being involved from start to finish.

A Speculative Home or what the industry calls a ‘Spec Home’ is constructed by a home builder with no particular client signed on, the home is being built to be put up for sale upon completion.These homes will have stock floor plans to choose from but that is as far as the customization goes.

If you are involved in the purchase of a Spec Home before it’s completion you are sometimes given the liberty to choose paint colours, plumbing fixture finishes and floor finishes as long as they that fit within the construction budget. This is a more affordable approach to home building for a few reasons:

 

1) Stock architectural and structural plans will be used for your new Spec Home. This means you are not paying for the creation of structural, mechanical electrical and architectural drawings from scratch. This plan creation and approval process can take years before you are even ready to start construction. Another helpful tip….time is always money in the construction industry.

2) Spec Home builders buy materials in bulk as they are more than likely building multiple homes at the same time. Like the Costco principle, buying construction materials in bulk is a great way to achieve cost savings. However, as a potential home owner you may not be a fan of the selected standard materials and finishes.

3) Spec Homes are built to sell and make a profit, where as Custom Homes are built to meet and exceed the expectations of their new owners. Not to suggest that more care and attention are spent on Custom Homes but when personal relationship are developed a Custom Home builder is more likely to put in the extra time and go the extra mile to make their client happy. Not only do relationships factor into the mix but because clients are selecting and approving the grade of materials and finishes going in their new home, there should be no short cuts in achieving exactly what the client wants.

What is the best option….Custom Built home or a Spec Built home?
That is not for me to decide as different people have different financial means and different expectations. I do think that the above information should be a good start to researching the decision for yourself.

Extraordinary League Contracting is a custom home builder in Vancouver, you can check-out our latest custom home project here.
You can drop us a line here – we’d be happy to answer any of your custom home building questions.