Selecting the right luxury builder for your Houston luxury house one of the most important tasks required for building a personalized custom home.
Retaining a luxury builder as a trusted adviser early in the pre-construction phase is essential for eliminating mistakes and saving money.
Selecting a luxury builder is much like the process of hiring a licensed attorney or a specialty surgeon, it takes the patience of doing your due diligence during the search process.
The search process often begins with a Google search like “luxury home builders near me”, which often yields a substantial list of various custom home builders. You might visit a dozen websites to reduce your search to a half a dozen luxury builder.
Further study of the builder’s content and photo galleries to create a preliminary list to have a qualifying phone conversation with. Preparing a list of preliminary questions from your research will prove to be a valuable tool for determining a further fit.
An additional source of referred leads for a luxury builder is asking your friends and work associates for recommendations. If you have been working with a real estate agent, they may be a source for your preliminary list of builders.
Where you start is not critical to the process, but selecting a custom home builder that will represent you as a trusted adviser is of great importance.
That is why the effort of searching to find the best fit for your needs is necessary. The primary goal is not just finding a professional luxury home builder, but rather finding a luxury builder that is aligned with your interest and business acumen.
There are many qualified luxury home builders in Houston. For the most part, they are honest business men with decades of experience that have developed business practices that fit their needs.
The challenge comes understanding if these practices fit your needs as a professional adviser and collaborating partner.
Learn about the luxury builders’ character requirements that should lead to selecting them
There are fundamental essential characteristics of any professional service provider that separate them in their industry. Let’s take a look at what these all-important 3 characteristics that are:
- Trusted Adviser
- Master Builders
- Intensely Client Focused
Trusted Adviser
Integrity in any profession is an admirable trait. Luxury builders are no different, although you would not have to go far to hear a good hair-raising story about someone’s horrific experience.
Integrity establishes a benchmark for doing business. It is the gold standard for an open and honest exchange of thoughts regardless of the persons acceptance to hear them.
A luxury home builder should have a professional responsibility to share Important and relevant information about luxury house building experience, regardless if the owner had the insight to ask the question.
A common example of this is when the owner asks preliminary questions about how much it will cost to build a luxury house. Although this question can be answered in way to make the owner think that it might be more cost effective to build your home with their home building company.
The proper response is to provide the owner a fair market cost range and explain that it completely depends upon the construction documents produced that will define the actual construction cost.
It is professionally a personal choice to elect to hold one’s self to consistent moral and ethical standards of professional practices.
Custom home builders are no different than many other professional services. There is a bottom tier in each profession that earns bad press for the remaining professionals in the industry.
This group is not too difficult to evaluate and often have left a long trail of dissatisfied clients.
The balance of the industry consists of generally good people getting caught up in the complications associated with financial transactions.
What makes luxury home builders so different than many other professional services is that custom house building is a very emotional process, not unlike the medical or legal professions. All three of these professionals are expensive and are required to deal in the most personal matters delivering their services.
The price tag of remodeling and the construction of a new luxury house can cause clients to get very emotional and stressed out.
This is brought on by the rapid decision making required of them and their personal service & performance expectations.
The top tier builders anticipate their client’s emotional sensitivity and work very hard to educate them on their process and systems to proactively set expectations.
They are open and honest with their clients, but sensitive of their bed side manner in communicating emotionally charged issues.
They will make a considerable effort in being forthcoming and transparent in their dealing with the owners. This is often at their own expense to maintain a working relationship.
Master Builders
The top tier luxury home builders have learned their trade by being hands on as builders through their professional life.
In many cases they started out as tradesmen and have built their business around the quality construction practices, they have used over the years.
Although there are fewer of these types of builders around these days, the business of remodeling and home building has become as much about excellent marketing and financial skills is as of construction skills.
Luxury custom home builders must be multi-skilled in all facets of business to be successful. The greatest difference in the skill set of the modern-day custom home builders is that they must be intensely focused on their clients’ needs, which will discuss shortly.
They are required to be experts in both construction management (onsite) as well as administrative management (offsite).
Administrative management are the financial and insurance affairs associated with a project. These are the back-office activities of cash flow, contracts, risk management and bid proposal tasks of construction.
Construction management are the responsibilities of onsite quality control, material & labor logistics, construction scheduling and all matters to do with onsite construction.
These activities require the luxury builder to be an expert in both construction, design, engineering as well as the operational business affairs of the business.
As with any professional service provider, luxury builders should demonstrate a commitment to their craft through continued education, professional associations and achieving industry accreditations.
Luxury builders in Houston are not required to be licensed by the state of Texas. There are no professional business competency qualifications or skill proficiency requirements that builders are required to pass.
This causes a greater need for a greater amount of due diligence on the behalf of the client to vet their professional home building partner.
Intensely Client Focused
Luxury custom home builders provide their valued clients a premium service. It should be the builder’s principal goal to provide their clients with the best service they can facilitate.
Building luxury houses requires an enormous amount of time and attention to the client’s needs and the activities necessary to execute a delivered product.
In most cases that means providing guidance during home site acquisition (lot), the design budgetary development process and the actual construction phase. This entire process can take up to 18 – 36 months in most cases.
You can begin to understand why a high percentage of the client / builder’s relationship get tested. This is indeed a long period of time to be engaged in a relationship that might be flawed.
Most client’s greatest frustration is not with the quality of the home construction if they have made half an effort to vet their luxury builder.
The stress on the clients is usually associated with one of two of the most common issues, miscommunication between parties and misaligned client expectations.
These frustrations are from repeated client disappointments resulting from the client’s expecting one thing while the luxury builder delivers something different than expected.
The second most frequent client dissatisfaction problems results from clients not understanding the builder’s building process and systems.
These include such system and process requirements that the client does not have a good understanding, like product selection priorities and construction sequences phases.
Mindful that the house building process is very emotional for most clients, a series of disappointments can lead to meltdowns and making mountains out of mole hills on both sides of the relationship.
The luxury builder’s responsibility is to over communicate with their client. They should provide the client with detailed construction schedule information, al schedule for prioritized product selections with the appropriate time lines and initiate regular reminders.
Furnishing structured schedule information for site meetings during construction will often head off client anxiety relating to on construction phase issues.
Selecting your luxury home builder is a significant decision in the remodeling or new custom home construction process.
Your selection process should include many social and business meetings in an effort to truly determine if your builder is going to be a good fit for your needs.
This should include sharing situational scenarios (what ifs) to access your builder’s moral and ethical compass.
You are much better off in conflict early in the selection process, then half way through construction. Take your time and select wisely.
Conclusion
If you sincerely want an enjoyable luxury home building experience you must get to know your luxury builder on many levels.
Understanding their business acumen, how they deal with adversity and truly advocating them as a trusted adviser is essential.
These factors that we have discussed separate the top performing business luxury home builders from the rest. Construction performance can always be repaired, a functional and professional relationship is much more difficult to unwind once engaged.
