Choosing the Person You Will Be Fighting With

Fairly often, I have clients who come into the office looking for tips on finding a contractor, and the first thing I tell them is, look for someone you can peaceably disagree with. There are things that are good indications that the contractor is a good one, for example reviews or if they have received help from the Success Group International, but generally I suggest that they are after thoughts. Construction is a field where I can guarantee you, something will go wrong. Oftentimes, many somethings, especially in remodelling and renovation work. The amount stuff goes wrong sometimes reflects on the skills of the architect, engineer, or contractor, but often is due to unknowable things, bad luck, or even indecisive owners. So, when things go wrong, you need someone who you can work with to make it right and the personality fit is far more important than most other details, including price. So if you’re looking for building contractors make sure you do you research into as many companies as possible, for instance check out Essex Homes Charlotte here! But still, how do you pick the person?

How you select depends a lot on your priorities. If you are budget driven, either due to the speculative nature of your project or the realities of your cash flow situation, then bidding a project out is a good way to go. Go find a design professional, work out what you want (be sure to tell the professional about your budget, they might not be able to give you all you want for your price, but should keep you in the general vicinity of your price or warn you if you’re way off target) and then get the professional to approach several contractors for you (between 4-6 is ideal depending on the size of the project and the likelihood of receiving bids from contractors) and get them to submit pricing. You can structure the bid so that you can have options (called alternates) that allow you to find out how much certain features will cost by themselves and then decide if they are worth it that way. While the contractors are constructing their bid, it is imperative that you interview themtegies like renovation builder Melbourne‘ and see what people have posted about them. Design professionals can often recommend contractors to you as well, but often the input of a former customer is more illuminating than ours for the simple fact that a lot of what goes on on the jobsite never comes back to us. Once you have your prequalified list, you can go out and interview the contractors and select the one that gives you the most faith they can do the job the way you want. Whether that faith comes from seeing their work that looks like the kind of building you want to a good personality fit doesn’t really matter, confidence in the builder at this point matters most. Note, if no one gives that warm squishy feeling inside, feel free to go the bidding route or get more names, it’s not like you have to have a contractor lined up in advance of design. The advantage of this route is the contractor and designer can work together to balance cost and quality earlier in the phase and this can help with the final value of the house. It will also give the contractor more of an ownership feeling on the building which is never a bad thing if you want someone to do it correctly.

There other ways to get a contractor, but responding to an add you see in the paper or calling around from the yellow pages is risky. Contractors are notorious for having bad actors and outright scammers and depending on your state, they can be very tricky to go after in court. I will always recommend interviewing and checking references, but like the stock market funds always say in their commercials, past performance is no guarantee of future success, but it is a good indicator.