Updated 11.21.25
Rock in First of all, you guys, home builder coach did want to tell you that last night. A friend said she didn’t understand cloning, and I told her that makes two of us think that’s a good one. Yeah. So, anyway, there’s there’s my one for the day. Okay. I got it out of them. I got it out of my system.
I feel better. No, it was the one you sent me the other day. It was really good. I don’t know, you’d have to look it up. It was probably something amazing. That’s all I know. So, man. Addicted to drinking brake fluid. Claims he can stop anytime he wants I that was it. Oh, yeah. That’s a good one. You’re welcome for that.
I call my horse Mayo because mayonnaise. That was my favorite one. That one’s pretty good too. Okay, so, let’s talk about something. Do you ever run into somebody who’s like, hey, I want to design, you know, they bring you a set of plans or, like, they’re talking to another builder that’s got, a custom layout, maybe that’s like, they had a set of plans drawn, and they’ve got a price from this other builder for this custom set of plans.
You ever run into this as a home builder coach? Yes. Yes. You have. And, how does that usually go for you? I mean, they usually think they can get a custom house for, like $400,000.
Always. Yeah, but they can’t. We all know that, right? And they don’t understand why. Right. So, when somebody has plans or if they’re like, hey, I want to draw a custom set of plans and I want to, like, get, you know, get with an architect and draw up my custom plans. And it should be the same price as building one of your pre-designed plans, right?
No. Why not?
So we don’t know everything that we’re going to encounter. And we’ve never built the plan before. Right? It’s a never been built before. Never going to be built again. Right. So what I tell people when they are talking about having an architect draw plans, this is kind of one of my things that I explain to them when architects draw plans, they draw plans that you will think look pretty and it meets all of your wish list requests.
But they have no idea what it costs to build anything. And everybody has a wish list and a willing to pay for list, and they are never the same.
Does that make sense? I I’ve got that wish list right, so it’s easy to give an architect a wish list of things I want. But the problem is and home builder coach just encountered this with one of my other builders today where he, he has a client that looked at one of his pre-designed floor plans. And I’ll just throw out a number.
It’s like, $184 a square foot to build that one. Right? And then he goes to an architect and he has a set of plans drawn and the set of plans he brings back. Are he the builder? Prices it out, and it’s like $215 a square foot. And he’s like, well, you should be able to build that architect drawing set of plans for the same dollars per square foot as the other one.
Why does why do those two things not match up? Well, there’s a lot of different things. It could be the lumber packs. It could be the materials used, like it could be the features, the tactile used, the flooring used. I mean, you got six, ten, 12, 20 milliliter flooring. It all goes up in pricing. So I use foundation, more roofs, more pitch.
More unused space. It might have more attic space or even more unfinished space in it. And obviously depending on placement infrastructure. Well, I lost my ex on the front of there. Here’s what expensive plans are. Oftentimes, they’ll have a side entry garage instead of a front entry. Do you know how much difference there is in the cost slash price of a side entry garage versus a front entry garage?
It’s roughly like 30,000 for the side entry and like 15 for the front. Correct. I’m going to give you the difference 15 to $20,000 difference is usually about 25 grand. Okay. Price. So if they select I want a site entry garage. On average it’s around 25 grand. More for a side entry garage than it is for a front entry garage.
So if they come in trying to compare against some other builder or some other home and it’s a site entry versus a front entry, that’s that’s a big difference. Most architects, when they draw plans are going to draw in a two car. Me and this in two car is 400ft².
And a three car is normally 600ft².
And architects draw.
Never draw that square footage.
Or that size car garage. So, the example that home builder coach just had with this builder that I was talking to earlier today that made me think this might be good to go over with you guys. Is they? The client literally came into him and he’s like, I don’t understand why you can’t build this plan. The architect drew for the same dollars per square foot is your plan that you guys have.
Well, when we started comparing what the architect drew, their two car garage was 638ft² versus the plan that was their pre-designed plan was 400ft². So you’ve got 238 extra square feet of garage. And he didn’t understand why the price would be more. He’s like, but it’s still a two car garage. Well, you have it. It’s 238ft² different.
An average garage is like $55 a square foot. So how much difference in price is that?
Popular. Sorry, home builder coach thought you were frozen for a second. No, I said if a if a garage on average cost $55 a square foot and the architect draws a two car garage that’s 238ft² more, how much more is that going to cost? $13,000. Very good. So you got 13,090 more dollars in garage. And the guy didn’t understand. Why would it be more expensive?
We got 238 extra square feet of garage. You guys, whether it’s an architect drawn plan or whether it’s another builder’s plan, like, or you’re comparing to theirs, like, these are the things you kind of got to go through. The plan that this architect drew had like ten more windows than their plan. We, you know, every one of those windows costs a few hundred bucks.
Right. Just to give you an example on this one that they brought to him, his covered patio square footage on the plan that the architect drew was 738 more square feet of covered patio than his house on average. What we used to charge was like 40 bucks a square foot. So if I go 40 bucks a square foot times 738ft², what’s the difference in cost?
$29,000 and $29,000. We just mentioned two items. One was 13,000 and the other was 29,000. How much difference in price is that? 40 to $42,000 difference in price? If it’s the same square feet of house and the customer was literally saying, but the square footage is the same, why would it be more expensive to build this house? You see what’s happening there?
Home builder coach thinks when we’re like talking about doing new home sales training things, right, we get we forget that the customer has no knowledge of what the standards are in our industry. Right? They don’t know that a two car garage is normally 400ft², and a three car garage is normally 600ft², but if you just go look at their garage and their garages 25 times 32, well, 20 by 20 is 400ft².
So 25 by 32 is definitely not 400ft². And you can do the math and quickly realize, guys, part of the reason this price is so different is because of the square footage here.
Architects always design a lot of outdoor living space because most customers say, yeah, I’d like a really I’d like a really big back porch, really big covered back patio. And so it’s the architect is being the excuse me, the architect is being paid to draw what they asked for, which is always the wish list. They’re not being paid to come in on budget.
Does that make sense?
