Why Isn’t My Builder Calling Back?

When getting bids for construction, it can be quite a daunting process. When you reach out to a builder and ask for a bid, you may not hear back for several weeks. What is the builder doing during this time?

I compare construction estimating to going grocery shopping. When you go to the grocery store with a shopping list, you don’t always find exactly what you want. Sometimes you change your mind based on the things that you see at the store, and sometimes you simply forget things on your list. With grocery shopping, you might have 10 or 20 things on your list, and all of them cost under $20. With construction, you literally have hundreds or thousands of things on your list, you have to find most of them at different places, and most of them cost over $1000 each. Additionally many of the items a builder seeks pricing for are not retail items sitting on shelves with prices next to them. Many of the products are specialty items that are priced depending on the situation requiring a bit of negotiating, and others are services from subcontractors like plumbers and electricians which require those companies to spend significant time assigning prices to each step of their work. That might take a couple weeks for the builder to hear back from those subcontractors and specialty material suppliers.

Once you do get the bid from your builder, you may find that the builder is not as responsive as you would hope. There are several reasons for this. The most likely reason would be: the builder is devoting more time to another project that they are already currently building rather than speculating on the cost of your potential project that hasn’t started yet. In other words, your project is less important than the one in the middle of construction (that the builder is being paid to do)! Another reason for unresponsiveness could be that the builder just recently sent out five bids to other clients and is waiting to hear back on whether those got accepted or not. Out of those five bids, two of those projects probably won’t ever happen. One of those projects might get awarded to another builder. And the two remaining projects might actually get awarded to that builder that you’re hoping to work with. The builder might prefer working with THEM instead of YOU.

It is then up to that builder to decide which opportunity is best. The builder will evaluate things like which one yields the best profit. They will decide which one has the most conveniences like ease of parking, suitable space on site for storing materials, or proximity to their home, office, or hardware store. They will also evaluate the relationship with the potential client and whether or not that person will be a pain in the ass to work with. All of these factors play into whether a builder will choose to work on any particular project. YOU might not be as important to THEM as you think.

Finding the right builder is like a marriage. It takes hard work, patience, and a good bit of luck. The best advice I can offer is to work WITH you builder and commiserate with them. They carry the immense burden of building your project properly and on budget. It is no easy task, so being a good partner will certainly help in the overall success.

If you’d like to learn more about our design process, visit www.josharch.com/process, and if you’d like to get us started on your project with a feasibility report, please visit www.josharch.com/help

Josh Architects Is A Design PRACTICE

Like, medicine and law, an architect’s work is known as a “practice.” This is because we never know with 100% certainty if we are right when we suggest something. We have a good sense that we should be correct based on previous experience in similar situations, but every situation is different, and it is our job as the experts to apply our experience to each unique situation to protect lives and the most valuable asset that people typically own: their home and the people in it.

This is a major responsibility. The term “EXPERience” looks a lot like “EXPERt.” By gaining experience through practice, we become an expert in our craft. By getting more practice than another architect, an architect has an opportunity to become more of an expert than the others. To date, I have worked in the construction field for 23 years and have practiced my craft on over 500 projects and counting. This is very prolific by comparison. For context, an average American lives in 11 homes in a lifetime, and most residential builders work on less than 4 homes per year. Architects commonly work on 3 or 4 projects at a time. Our practice has around 100 current projects, and I gain experience by managing all of them. Being intimately involved on the design of hundreds of homes has given me the practice to know what to expect in a myriad of situations where others just don’t have the life experience to know and anticipate what I can.

Many people have jobs where they repeat the same process over and over, and they perfect their job to a point where it operates mostly on autopilot. This is not possible for architects. Sure, we do have protocols we put in place to streamline our efforts to save time, but the same process simply cannot apply to every unique situation. We must pull from our repertoire of experience to customize a process for each situation. There are so many factors that can affect the process of designing a house: a different building department, a different building department staffer, a different builder, a different client personality, a different climate, a different location, a different set of materials, a different wind or earthquake exposure, a different structural engineer, a different building code, a different budget, a different timeline, a different aesthetic, a different political climate, a different culture, etc. There are SO MANY things that alter the way we approach our work to complete it successfully.

Completing our job successfully does NOT mean that each step of the process is successful. Reminder: this is a “practice.” When you practice, you do it imperfect before you finally get it perfect. When you practice something a lot, you get pretty good at it with flaws here and there, but you eventually overcome them and get better. As we practice architecture, we do small “experiments,” then we test them, and we improve upon whatever results we find.

For example, if we want to maximize the percentage of a property we are allowed to cover according to land use code limits, we design something that seems to work. Then we calculate the result and adjust as needed. An experienced architect won’t be egregiously incorrect, and only minor adjustments will be needed. In this example, we are either a little over or a little under. Our previous practice enables us to use our intuition to get somewhere close to ensure the size of the building properly fits within the limitations of the property.

Similarly with budgets, we need to design something we THINK will be on budget, and test our hypothesis by asking builders for bids. With enough practice, we get close, and we make adjustments according to the results of the bid to keep things on budget.

With a complicated design feature, we base the design solution from something similar we have done in the past. Then, we test our result by running it by engineers, pricing the materials, and talking with experts on the materials that we THINK will work. We learn from our practice, and we adjust accordingly. The cost of hiring an architect has these failures and successes (and past experiences) built into the price. Clients are paying for the architect’s time AND their ENTIRE history of experience, education, successes, and failures.

As you see, the architecture profession is very much a “practice” to test the architect’s ideas to adapt them as best as possible for their clients. It all comes down to the trust of a client to accept the experience of the architect, so the architect may make educated decisions and let them play out through the design process. Remember, nothing is final until it is built, so any decisions made are just a part of the vetting process to tailor a concept into reality.

If you’d like to learn more about our design process, visit www.josharch.com/process, and if you’d like to get us started on your project with a feasibility report, please visit www.josharch.com/help