Architect expenses
One of the biggest expenses involved in building a custom home is the actual design itself. When you start from an empty slate, you’ll need an architect to design your home, and this can be costly. There are certainly other factors that affect the cost of building a new home, but this is certainly one of the major ones.
Designing custom homes is a lot more involved than simply drawing a floor plan. Everything needs to be taken into consideration, from the land you’re building on to the position of lighting through the house. This takes time, and of course, a qualified professional, therefore, the cost increases.
When building your home from ready-made designs from your building company, all of that work is already done, bar a couple of tweaks to suit your plot of land.
Approvals
This aspect may not necessarily affect the cost, but in some circumstances, it can. Let’s say you hired an architect to design your dream home. You take the plans to the builder, and it gets submitted to the council for approval. 9 out of 10 times there probably won’t be an issue, but if the council won’t approve the plans for some reason, you need to go back to the architect.
In this situation, the architect’s fees may increase because they have to do additional work making the changes for council approval. Even if the architect includes these amendments in their initial fee, it will still slow down the process which means more time until you can move into your new home.
Size matters
It’s not always the case, but many custom homes are larger than pre-designed house plans. Naturally, with more size comes the need for more materials, so that adds to your overall cost. Aside from material costs, a larger home will take longer to build. Your builder should give you a fixed price for the build, but this will be based on the number of hours the team will take to build the house. Therefore, the price will be higher if the home is larger.