ᐅ Is Membership in a Private Home Builders Association Worthwhile?
Created on: 12 Jan 2018 09:51
M
Marcello
Hello,
Yesterday, I came across the Association of Private Homeowners through a trade magazine, the Verband Privater Bauherren e.V. I called their Berlin office today and was informed that members benefit from discounts.
My specific questions were about (a) legal support for reviewing contracts either with architects or prefabricated house suppliers and (b) independent construction and quality inspections during the building process.
Can anyone share personal experience regarding whether membership offers worthwhile advantages? The monthly membership fee is reasonable, but I don’t want to waste money unnecessarily. My main interest is especially in the two services mentioned above.
Thank you.
Yesterday, I came across the Association of Private Homeowners through a trade magazine, the Verband Privater Bauherren e.V. I called their Berlin office today and was informed that members benefit from discounts.
My specific questions were about (a) legal support for reviewing contracts either with architects or prefabricated house suppliers and (b) independent construction and quality inspections during the building process.
Can anyone share personal experience regarding whether membership offers worthwhile advantages? The monthly membership fee is reasonable, but I don’t want to waste money unnecessarily. My main interest is especially in the two services mentioned above.
Thank you.
MachsSelbst schrieb:
Although there are limits to this. Certainly, the site manager (who are usually civil engineers, so I find it somewhat disrespectful to put that in quotation marks as if they were untrained people with just a two-week construction training) is paid by the general contractor (GC) and therefore biased. I always put the contractor’s "site managers" in quotation marks, but never to question their competence (which unfortunately only benefits the client to a very limited extent). I also never claim that architectural site supervision is performed by better-trained professionals. A single-family home is best designed with a small architectural firm with just one licensed professional (an architect, usually university-educated rather than a university of applied sciences graduate with relevant practical experience qualifying them), who shares site supervision with an assistant (typically qualified as a draftsman). In that case, the site manager may not even be a civil engineer or foreman. But here, the supervision’s loyalty is clearly first and foremost with the client, and such a small architectural firm tends to have locally concentrated projects that can be counted on one hand. I also recommend involving an accompanying independent expert as a kind of backup support. These experts often were previously contractor "site managers" themselves and have moved to self-employment to avoid burnout. Some even temporarily return to permanent employment during family formation phases. MachsSelbst schrieb:
People only call me for systems that are malfunctioning, never for those running perfectly, so I can appreciate the flawlessness of our work... That is precisely the problem that often leads to burnout: lots of "firefighting," few moments of success, a staffing ratio dictated by budget cuts (the site manager is supposed to be cheaper than the potentially much greater costs of disasters without one), and accordingly, a lot of driving distances. It’s like constantly being a self-driven emergency medic on a bike, only without sirens or an emergency lane. The question regarding detours is only "when." Competence is ambivalent: professionally, it may ease daily tasks, but on the other hand, without it there would be fewer conflicts with management. I’d rather keep my calm freelancer role as a jack-of-all-trades know-it-all (unfortunately here without punctuation or emoji).https://www.instagram.com/11antgmxde/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/bauen-jetzt/
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