How to Avoid Costly Pitfalls When Building a Custom Prefab Home

Show Notes:

If you’re planning to build a custom panelized home, this episode dives straight into the common pitfalls of the planning and budgeting stages and exactly how you can avoid them. You will learn why relying on cheap, incomplete floor plans often leads to massive schedule delays and budget blowouts when dealing with building departments and unpredicted site challenges. By listening, you will discover the crucial importance of site-specific research—like paying for geotechnical soil reports and verifying fire department access—and how securing a comprehensive, customized structural and architectural design upfront is the ultimate key to staying on budget, keeping on schedule, and successfully building a home that can be passed down for generations.

Transcript:

Steve Tuma: We are a company that wants to give our customers um a very clear perspective on the realities of building. It takes a lot of time, it’s a second job in in a sense, and there’s there’s always something to work with.

Host: Greetings everyone and welcome to episode 87 of the Panelized Prefab Kit Home Building Show. With me today as always is the president and founder of Landmark Home and Land Company. A company which has been helping people build their new homes where they want, exactly as they want, nationwide and around the globe since 1993. Mr. Steve Tuma. Steve, how are you, sir?

Steve Tuma: Doing great. Another great day for building homes. It’s always a good day to build a house. To design it.

Host: It’s never a bad day to build the house is what you’re saying.

Steve Tuma: Ah, it’s good, it takes a little time to plan it out, think it through, get it taken care of, then you get the shovels and start digging a hole. It’s a lot of fun.

Host: And who worries about all the planning? You know, today I thought we’d jump into um I don’t know if we’ve ever touched on anything like this before. We do kind of talk sometimes about the ups and downs of of being a homeowner builder, but today I thought we’d discuss the pitfalls of homeownership and homeowner building in general. Are you good with that?

Steve Tuma: Oh yeah. This is an interesting, it’s an interesting angle.

Host: I hope so because uh I’m gonna throw some stuff at you that that may surprise you a little bit, but let’s just start off with an easy one. No curve balls. Just what would you say are the pitfalls if there are any of owner buildership?

Steve Tuma: Well, it’s kind of an interesting thing. There’s a couple perspectives on that, but I think a pitfall is that people have to be honest with themselves in the situation of what they want to do.

So um you you can save a lot of money, you can make sure that your house is built right, you can be involved, there’s a personal gratification of it um to say, hey I did this, I learned it, I planned it, I built it, you know, maybe they did some work themselves. But people have to understand it is a lot of work.

You know, at the beginning kind of honeymoon stage when you’re doing plans, everything’s like, oh this is cool, what kitchen do we want, what windows, how big is the garage going to be? It’s a lot of fun. But then there’s the reality of hey we got to make sure the plans work well, make sure it fits on your lot, make sure the energy codes work, make sure the design’s right, and then in that there’s the reality of how much does it cost. And does does it work within the budget and and how do you go through and budget it, but also there’s the idea of the schedule.

We work with a lot of owner builders and a lot of them do a some of the work themselves or a lot of the work. We’ve actually had families where other friends and family are in the trades and they literally build a house themselves. We have some people that are on the other end of the spectrum where they they hire a general contractor to manage it. And then we we’ve had people in between.

So I think a lot of the situations is is really having a true understanding of what’s sensible to build. And amazingly, a lot of the customers that call us, they they’ve thought this through, they’ve looked at their land, they’ve talked to the building department, they’ve talked to their banker or they already have the cash or whatever, they’ve thought it through what we’re doing is is helping them tie it together.

But but we are a company that wants to give our customers um a very clear perspective on the realities of building. It takes a lot of time, it’s a second job in in a sense, and there’s there’s always something to work with. We always say hey work with the best people possible. We provide an excellent service, excellent plans, excellent support, excellent panelized home, but there’s also a lot of other people involved. And the better quality and more responsive people that you have, say doing the excavation, the foundation, the framing, you know mechanicals continuing on through it, it it’ll be more successful.

So sometimes people say well, you know, my my uncle’s gonna fly in from five states away and do the plumbing for free. It’s like, well, that’s great, is he really gonna do it? You know, sometimes you have to have the conversation or or this situation on a budget where people will say, hey it’s only another thousand you know to put a to put a a steam room in or some steam function on a shower. But you gotta watch it because a thousand here and a thousand here suddenly becomes ten thousand. Yeah. No joke.

So so what we try to do is, you know, give a very sharp and real perspective of the reality of building the home. And we are here to to help people so if people don’t understand or they need a little bit deeper perspective on it, we’re fully capable of uh spending the time and and we desire to spend the time so that people have a successful build.

Um our our customers understand the process, but it’s all it’s always good just to have other little conversations through the design phase, the building phase to to help people understand what it’s really about. But what what’s interesting in this age of the internet and all these TV shows, a lot of people have some decent perspective of what it is, but I do have to caution them. A lot of these TV shows are just there to get advertising money, not necessarily you know, put the reality of what it’s like to build and the reality of the decision, what ifs, you know, things that that come into play.

And because of our real life experience over over three decades, we got a great perspective of of how we can provide answers to a customer for how it applies to them specifically. And I think I think that’s one point is you know, building a house, say if you were building a house in the in the Rockies and you took that exact home and put it into suburban New York or you put it on an ocean front uh Florida, even though it’s the same house, it’s a different experience.

Host: Mm-hmm.

Steve Tuma: So that that I think is where we’ll be um very helpful is people asking us questions and we can give answers particular to their exact project. Um with the advent of AI coming along, a lot of people are referring to AI to get answers and it’s it might be a good guideline, but it’s not a definite path.

Host: Sure.

Steve Tuma: Um so so we want to, you know, kind of explain to people how things work for for their situation, their house, their land, for for the home that their family wants to build. So it’s it’s it’s basically, you know, I have a couple conversations, work things through in the design phase to to get things figured out and and we’ll we’ll take the time that a customer needs to understand their project so they get a, you know, a focused vision of of how to be successful in building a home.

That’s the thing. It’s a little bit of a reality check for some people. Other people catch onto it right away and I would say over 90 percent of our customers are pretty pretty much on top of it, but we’re still here to uh to really help them through.

Host: Mm-hmm.

Steve Tuma: It’s fun. That that’s actually the very interesting part because even though we’ve been doing this for over three decades, every once in a while a customer comes up and says, hey what about this under this condition? And uh we’re able to help them. It’s pretty cool.

Host: You know everybody wants...