$340 to $525 a square foot, and here is the rest of it.
This is the question every family asks first and almost every builder answers with a meeting invitation. The range below is real, it is ours, and the six things it does not cover are printed underneath it rather than discovered in month nine.
Why the range is that wide.
A house is mostly decisions, and the decisions are not evenly priced. The bottom of that range is a well built, plainly detailed house: nine foot ceilings, a sensible window schedule, painted millwork, quartz, a roof with four hips in it.
The top is the same square footage with a fourteen foot span in the great room, exposed and finished framing, steel windows, stone that has to be quarried and matched, a kitchen made rather than bought, and a roof with eleven planes. Both are houses we are proud to plate. One costs half as much again as the other.
Nothing in that range is padded to cover surprises. Builders who quote low carry the surprises in the allowances instead, which is why the allowances are printed further down this page.
| Not in the square foot number | What it runs |
|---|---|
| The land | Wildly variable. Sheet 06 has the ranges by community |
| Site work, clearing, fill, tree protection | $18,000 to $60,000 |
| Permits and impact fees | $16,000 to $38,000 |
| Architecture and engineering | 8 to 12 percent of construction |
| Pool and deck | $85,000 to $160,000 |
| Landscape and irrigation | $40,000 to $120,000 |
A four thousand foot house, added up.
This is the calculation we do on a whiteboard in the first meeting. It is the difference between the number people remember from the internet and the number they will actually write cheques against. The lot is not in it.
The numbers builders keep in the appendix.
An allowance is the money set aside in the contract for something you have not chosen yet. It is also the easiest place in the industry to quote low and finish high: carry $9,000 for appliances, let the family fall in love with a range that costs $14,000, and the overage arrives as a change order with your name on it rather than the builder's.
So here are ours, carried on a four thousand square foot house. If another builder's number is lower than yours needs to be, that is not a saving, it is a deferral.
| Allowance | Carried |
|---|---|
| Cabinetry and millwork | $115,000 |
| Countertops and stone | $34,000 |
| Tile | $38,000 |
| Flooring | $30,000 |
| Appliances | $28,000 |
| Plumbing fixtures | $22,000 |
| Lighting and fans | $16,000 |
| Door and cabinet hardware | $9,500 |
Three questions about money.
Why do two builders quote the same house forty percent apart?
Almost never because one is greedy. Usually it is four things: the allowances are set differently, one bid excludes site work and the other includes it, one carries a real contingency and the other does not, and one has priced the drawings that exist while the other has priced the house he imagines you will settle for. Put both bids side by side and read the exclusions page first. It is the only page that tells you what you are comparing.
What happens when I change my mind in month nine?
You get a written change order with a price and a schedule impact on it, and nothing happens until you sign it. Small changes are common and cheap. The expensive ones are structural, or anything that moves plumbing, or anything that touches a wall that is already closed. One of our last twelve houses finished six weeks late because a kitchen was redrawn in month ten, and that house is on the chart on sheet 04 with the reason printed next to it.
Is the price fixed?
Yes, on the house as drawn and specified, and that is why we will not price a house from a sketch. The three things that can still move it are a change you ask for, an allowance you spend past, and something genuinely unforeseeable in the ground. We carry a contingency for the third and we have used it eleven times in forty seven years, mostly for muck that no soil report predicted.