If you’re getting ready to start, or have already started the process of building your new home, you are probaly finding that there are hundreds of decisions to be made. My goal here is to help with some of the questions you have by providing as much common sense information as I can regarding the comfort and efficiency of a new home. I sincerely believe that you can do some very easy things to drastically increase your home efficiency.
Let’s take a second and talk about the different types of homebuilders active in Lake and Porter counties in Northwest Indiana.
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Production builders
Production builders will generally have fewer options available than custom or semi cuctom builders. This is to be expected given their business model. Successful production builders are so because they have figured out how to build their particular models quickly and efficiently allowing them to be very competitive cost wise. Any options that are not typically handled by their staff can cause delays and cost over runs. If you are working with a production builder and sense they don’t want to deal with a lot of changes, you are probably correct. This is not an indictment of this business model, you are definitely getting the benefit of buying some scale and economies of scale.
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Custom Home Builder
Even in this niche there are numerous customer experience models. Most of the truly custom home builders are former trades that wanted to build for themselves. This process will be much more involved in the design and selections. You are going to get the exact house you want, but you will be paying for one of a kind. This builder is much more willing to try new types of technologies as long as you’re willing to pay learning curve.
Custom home builders in Northwest Indiana are much more prone to look at zoning, to look at hybrid heat, geothermal, insulation increases for comfort and efficiency. This isn’t to say that Production home builders won’t allow these types of changes, but they will probably want to use their own existing contractors, some of these contractors may have limited options available.
In general custom homes are going to cost more, but allow a much more intense customer experience.
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U are the Builder
Lastly, due to increase in home costs, and flexibility of schedules some people will choose to build and contract their own homes. If you are interested in this kind of process you can hire someone to “consult” with you to get better pricing and plans, but you are the contractor. You can have anything you want, and the universe of home comfort options is huge, but you pay the learning curve.
Tags: energy efficiency, home builder, home comfort, new construction, nothwest indiana
