General Contractor Bids!
If you are planning on building your house, and want to try and save significant amounts of money, you are probably going to act as your own general contractor. Since you won't be hiring a general contractor, many people think that they become obsolete. This is entirely untrue. Although you aren't planning on actually hiring a general contractor, why not go ahead and just check to see if they can give you a good enough deal to change your mind? It is worth a shot. They probably won't, but by asking for a bid from them you get some valuable things, in fact, you get two things, and just those two make it worth it. You get the following: free information, and a possible builder if you should change your mind.
Chances are you won't be changing your mind about owner building, especially if you put in the time to learn about it, and if you see the amounts of money you could save by building a house yourself. However, it is always worth having a backup plan, and you just can't go wrong doing that. What if you have a serious health issue come up and end up hospitalized? What then? Do you just leave your project unfinished? No, you hire someone to finish it for you. So, having a list of those someone's and their bids will be very useful if the occasion and need for it arises. So, go to at least three different general contractors from your area and get them to give you a bid-it's free and very valuable to you.
How do you get a bid? Well, first you need to ask for it, and second, you need to provide some information to the contractor about what you want. If you have a detailed set of plans and specs, you can take them to a contractor and get a bid on your plans. This is your best option, as it will be the most valuable way to use the information they provide you. You will want to do this with 3 different contractors. If you provide all 3 contractors the same set of plans you will be able to appropriately compare the bids, and find out where the differences are. This means you will be able to see what kind of money you can save just by using one person over another. The bids could differ up to 15% on the same exact set of plans. So, having the exact plans is important because it means the bid is on the same thing, not the same idea of a building, but the same exact building.
Now, the best thing to do with these bids is use them to save yourself some money. How do you do that? Well, you can use these bids to help you save money by having the general contractor give you line item estimates on each thing, with an indication of who will be doing the work, their guys, or someone else's. Also, have them prepare a written schedule showing sequence, and how they will finish in six months.
If they do this for you, you just saved hours of work for yourself, and you get expert opinion on every aspect of your process. This will give you an idea of whether or not your schedule is realistic, and how it needs to be adjusted. It will also help you see specifics of where you can save. And, it is a list of possible subs to use for your jobs. As you can see, whether you use the general contractor to actually build your house or not, the information they provide is invaluable to you.
