Crunching the Numbers for a Sedona Custom Home

What does it take to get the new custom home in your mind into your life in Sedona? The bottom line will be numbers! Here is how it works.

At the start, you will have a mental concept of your home. Let's face it, it is nearly impossible to price a "mental concept", at least with any degree of accuracy. Think of it as like a trip through the grocery store. You grab a cart and say your budget is $100, but you travel through the deli on your way to the checkout counter, and find out you "went over" when they ring you up. As you make decisions, isle by isle, the details add up and reality sets in. A custom home is like a trip to the grocery store on steroids, to say the least, and you will spend months, not hours, to go through the process. There are hundreds of big and small ticket items to decide on, all of which add up to the real cost of the house that started in your head. Now there are ways to curb your appetite as you go through the process, but even after the architecture and interior design have been defined, you may still have to crunch numbers to make it fit your budget. Here are three things to remember.

1. Cost per Square Foot Estimates: These are the least accurate estimates of all. They are usually used in the very beginning when you are interviewing builders and designers. Of course you will hear quotes all over the board from "low ball" estimates like $150 per square foot, to "high balls" like $300 per square foot and up! Beware of the "low ball" approach. These folks will give you a false reality in the hopes of winning your business. Beware of the "high ball" approach, too. These folks may not be in touch with your reality.
2. Cost Allowances from Preliminary Designs: Cost allowances are usually not hard bids, they are just an educated guess based on assumptions. The level of accuracy that you can expect from allowances made from preliminary drawings can get you closer to the mark, but will still not be reliable enough to go the bank. Preliminary drawings are still short on details This can mean the some things don't get included and some things are over estimated with assumptions. The assumptions will frustrate you and the exclusions will leave you disappointed when they are finally covered.
3. Final Pricing from Construction Drawings: These are the most accurate numbers if the drawings are fully detailed. BUT you may still need to crunch to meet bugtet. General Contractors and Subcontractors use different means to calculate their costs for materials, labor, overhead, profit and such, even when they receive detailed drawings. In my experience over the decades, I find that construction costing is not an exact science, in fact sometimes it is more of an "art". You can submit the same set of details to many different contractors and get different pricing...go figure.So in summary before you can break ground, you must roll up you sleeves and hammer away with your General Contractor and Subcontractors to extract the real numbers. And you may need to sacrifice some of the design in the end to get to your goal. But please hammer at the pricing first before you give away parts of your dream.