Custom home clients are a bright and accomplished lot, but every project is a learning experience for its owners. And if the process is something of a university without walls (or, perhaps, a university about walls), we know what that makes you. So, professor, what is your core curriculum? What wisdom can you impart to your clients that will save them the most money, effort, and heartache?
Northern Virginia custom builder Wayne Foley answers without hesitation: “Find a good builder and trust him.” Before signing a contract, Foley makes sure that his clients have laid to rest any doubt that they have chosen the right builder. “We insist that they do their homework. We give them close to 100 references, and it’s very hard to get a second meeting with our company without some evidence that they’ve done some due diligence.” Rather than tout his own trustworthiness, Foley insists that prospective clients speak with past clients. “Not one or two or three—multiple clients. I tell my clients any builder can make three people happy.” And if they don’t know the hard questions to ask, Foley supplies them: “When something went wrong—and something is always going to go wrong—how was it worked out? The biggest question is, if you were going to do it again, would you use the same builder?”
The point of the exercise is to condition clients for the work ahead and weed out those who don’t seem ready. “I’ve been at this full-time since 1970. I’m still learning stuff every day, and to try to teach the custom home business to a lay person in three or four months is a physical impossibility. I don’t care how smart they are.” That means they must rely on their builder’s experience, judgment, and good faith. Every client comes with a personal version of what Foley calls “that monster at the bottom of the stairs”: their fear of being taken advantage of. Before they sign on with him, he says, “I want them to turn on the light and go down there and address it.”
Brian Bailey, who does business in Austin, Texas, also believes in getting inside his clients’ heads. “My job is not so much to build houses, it’s to control the anxiety of my clients,” he says. “How you do that is very simple: It’s good and continued communication and organization.” People need to hear something more than once in order to remember it, he says. So he repeats this, gently but persistently: “Don’t procrastinate with selections.” Some clients arrive at his door, plans in hand, resolved that there will be no change orders on their project. Bailey quickly disabuses them of that misconception. “Building the house is an evolutionary process; there are going to be changes,” he explains to them. “I’ve never seen a perfect set of plans,” and even the most complete set leaves plenty of room for interpretation. The client’s job is to stay engaged and make decisions in a timely manner. “We have a very sequential order of the selection process. Every time they vary from it, their anxiety level goes up.” In the timeliness of their decisions, “[clients] do have an impact on the delivery schedule of the project”—and on their own state of mind. Bailey puts it this way: “It’s the difference between finishing your tax return in January or finishing it on April 14th. And everyone knows that anxiety.”
Palo Alto, Calif., custom builder Drew Maran would like to push the decision-making process even further upstream. He is accustomed to receiving architectural details, cabinet shop drawings, and mechanical designs well into the construction phase. Lately it has occurred to him to ask, “What percentage of that work could have been done without any construction taking place?” His answer is, most if not all of it, and with considerable benefit to all concerned. So Maran has begun impressing upon owners and architects “how important it is to get specs and details early in, or even before, construction.” While Maran’s projects are at the high end of the scale, he says, putting all the choices on the table at the outset allows clients to prioritize their spending. Delaying decisions and relying on allowances makes that kind of value engineering difficult or impossible.
