ᐅ Prefab house providers – how did you find your general contractor?

Hello everyone,

I’m starting this thread with the intention of sharing experiences that future building families might benefit from.

What was your journey like from the decision “We’re building a house” to signing the construction contract? What approach did you take? Did you work with an architect in advance for specific project phases and then approach potential builders with a design (project phase 3), a building permit/planning permission (project phase 4), or even a detailed construction plan (project phase 5)? Did you perhaps have your own architect for all project phases? Or did you go straight to your preferred builder without actively or passively comparing offers? What experiences did you have along the way? Looking back, do you think you made a good or bad choice? What would you do differently with the knowledge you have today?

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I’ll start. What did our process look like?

• Requests to 4 architects for project phases 1-3
• Decision for one architect with a fixed-price offer
• The design plan then served as the basis for offers from 5 home builders
• ALL offers were 10-25% above our maximum budget of 400,000 euros (approx. 440,000 USD)
• Comparability was not ideal in a passive builder comparison (without a tender), but still insightful
• Discussions were intensified with 2 builders and practically re-planned to stay within budget
• We signed a contract 5 months after the first contact

How do we look back on the process?

We are currently satisfied with our builder. Construction has not yet started. The path to the builder was suboptimal:

• We definitely made an expensive mistake choosing the architect. On the one hand, the design was financially unfeasible for us and thus (almost) worthless, and on the other hand, the design showed some technical weaknesses as we realized during the further process
• Generally, I still find the idea of using a design to get offers very promising. However, I would definitely try to include a clause in the architect contract stating that the majority of the fee is only paid if, for example, at least two offers from a defined list of general contractors remain within the defined budget
• Thought: Maybe the design doesn’t even have to come from an architect. A construction supervisor or a CAD freelancer would surely cost only a fraction of the architect’s fee and might also create a design tailored to our needs that could serve well as a basis for the offers

That’s it from me for now. If you have any questions, I’m happy to go into more detail on specific points. Otherwise, I look forward to hearing about other people’s experiences.