New Home Design: How to choose the best way to design your next home.
When building a new home, choosing the right home design for your next home can be a long and difficult process, but it need not be. Here’s why.
In my current display home at the [Delfin-Lend Lease] Woodland Estate at Waterford, South of Brisbane here’s what I often see and hear:
- People struggle with reading house plans. They seem unable to put themselves into the design from a two dimensional sketch.
- Still others come by with “mud maps” of what they want to have priced to build. They have seen something they like and want to get that priced from more than one builder. But they can’t see the problems in their design.
- Others say “I’ll know the right home design when I see it”. These people just wonder around waiting for a display home to knock their socks off. This rarely happens so they pick the path of least resistance, usually a “special sales offer from a home builder they just walk into.
These repeating themes I have encountered since I first started as a home consultant for AV Jennings in 1985.
What most home buyers seem to be saying
What home buyers seem to be saying is :
Show me your home, and I’ll tell you if its right for me. I know best.
And they are not asking about house plans, because most people have moved form house plans [ a thinking process], to walking a display home [ a doing and feeling process]
They want to actually walk the plan of the model home to get a feel for home. That is, they want to feel how the space and internal aspect affects them emotionally. If the plan does not suit, then they assume that I can’t help them build the right home for them.
Whilst this makes sense to get a feel of what is available in home designs today, to me it is not the best approach, because it does not discover your real and future needs, no matter how many homes you look at.
For most I suspect, this is the only route they would ever consider for building a home. That is ” I like this plan that I am in, the pricing looks OK, and it fits on my land. These are the easy customers to deal with as they are “feelers”.
Discovering Home Buyers Needs: The Best Way to design your home.
I prefer a needs discovery approach for my home buyer clients so that they can get the best value out of their next home.
his encourages the feelers to think about their current and future needs and how this home will improve their lives, beyond their initial niggles about the home they are currently living in.
In other words,
this method allows home buyer to empty their bucket of needs and wants, discover what they really want out of a new home, then put together their home design based on their real needs, and build that into their new home.
The Usual way of choosing the home to build. Does it bring the best design outcomes?
So when you look at how people actually go about choosing the design of and building a new home, the process would go something like this.
- They become dissatisfied with their current home. Something about it annoys them. They need a change because of one specific reason.
- They look at established homes. Quickly the home buyer sees that most homes sold are badly designed and not what they are looking for.
- They visit a display village and discover heaps of options that never considered.
- They find a home design that suits and then look for land to build it on.
- They sign an initial building agreement after making modification to the plans.
- After they have signed a building agreement, they discover changes that need to be made, because they have needs that won’t be met with the current plan that have surfaced in the meantime.
As you can see this is back to front. It does not discover your needs before you start the paperwork, and unravelling mistakes later cost you more and delays building and that will mean greater costs caused by the delays in moving into your new home.
In fact many home buyers don’t make changes they know they should because the house building delays that this will cause. So they don’t get the home they really need, but the best one that there design approach allowed.
Your best home design, on time and within budget
If you don’t want this ti happen to you, then contact Rick Adlam at radlam@homemate.com.au or by phone on 0413 268 166 for a free no obligation home design appointment.
