Avoiding a Luxury Home Nightmare

Answer 1

When you decide to build a luxury home and start talking to friends and family about your luxury home dreams, you'll hear a lot of Horror stories. We won't repeat them here – you've probably had an earful already. A luxury home builder, by definition, is one who designs unique homes on specific lots especially to meet the requests of their clients. This means a luxury home builder will build only a few homes each year – he or she can't build more than that and get the kind of quality that defines each home as a luxury home.

When choosing a luxury home builder, you'll want to shop around for a builder with a solid reputation. You can start with the National Association of Home Builders, or NAHB at nahb.org, and locate several builders who work in the area where you want to build. Before even meeting the builder, you should ask for references and talk with those references to see if the builder's reputation holds true among his or her clients.

To avoid having your luxury home turn into a long-term nightmare, you'll want to do your research and avoid the common traps. Ask the home builder the following questions:

• Do you obtain the required building permits, or is that our responsibility?
• What steps do you take to guarantee our home will be safe and trouble-free?
• Who oversees the construction and who will we communicate with during the process?
• Do you employ your own construction crew or do you hire subcontractors?
• If you hire subcontractors, what guarantee do we have that their work will be high-quality?
• How long with this process take and what are the basic steps?

Once you've chosen your home builder, you'll need to be ready to provide them with the plans – or talk through the plans they have and make any configuration changes. If your builder has a show room, spend some time examining the quality of construction. The show room is intended to show their best work, so it's important to know if you'll be happy with that work. If they have recently built or are finishing another home, you can ask to see that workmanship as well. This is often the best way of meshing the show room quality with the actual production work to know if you have chosen the right builder for your luxury home.