Senior Executive shares what worked on her custom house

 

I just got off a really interesting call with a former colleague of mine (a Senior Executive in Marketing) who is just coming to the end stages of building a custom house. It’s not being built with us, but with another provider, and she mentioned some things which actually really worked for her in the process and things which she thought could have been done better.

Some of the things which worked well for her were that her contractor took her through some of the previous projects they’d work on. That really demonstrates a couple of things. One, it demonstrates that the previous clients had confidence in their contractor and were able to give them the latitude to take a prospect through their completed project. It also gave the contractor the opportunity to show what different finish choices could be like in context. It also then showed them how it could relate to the project that they were contemplating.

One of the things which also worked for them was that their contractor was very professional and followed through on timelines, even for delivering the quote for the overall project. As well during the process, they gave them options to either spend more or spend less to stay in their budget, and also, to get the most bang for their buck.

They also were able to do a couple things on their end to provide the contractor help, in terms of getting the project to flow more smoothly. They would send pictures or clippings of looks that they would like and tell the contractor to give them a couple of options within each look in order to narrow down the amount of choices they had to make. They also had a list of things which they would like the builder to make the base choices on for them to approve. This gave them the opportunity to understand that there were a lot of things on the project, as well, there were things that they didn’t need to pay that much attention to. There were also things which they need to focus on. They did that, and they were able to then create a project which they were happy with, as well as devoting the amount of time and focus which they wanted to the decisions on the project.

This is something which we like to do, as well. We call it creating comfort and control for your custom building project. We understand that people are busy. What we like to do is take the decisions which have to be made and put them into specific parts of the process so that you’re not being overwhelmed with decision paralysis.

This is something you’ll see more of in the future. For now, this has been Jeffrey Veffer, of Incite Design. Don’t forget to visit www.incited.ca/signup, where you can sign up for helpful tips and hints to help you in the construction jungle.