$70,000 for an architect?!?! How about spending $0 if you build a modular?
I’ve been following pretty closely the “Dream Home Diaries” blog which is written by two married writers for the New York Times (Alison Davis, and Paul Brown). In a nutshell, its the story of a husband and wife who already own two houses - one in New Jersey and a second in Massachusetts - as they build their “Dream Home” near Tampa, Florida. The whole blog series is based on the fact that Alison & Paul have no experience in building a home and they are going into it not knowing what to expect.
When I first heard about this series, I thought, “This is perfect! This is exactly what our customers do - build their home with no prior experience, I’m courious to see how well Alison & Paul make out in this endeavor.” (In fact, I even tried contacting them to see if I could be of help - but didn’t hear anything back.) In anycase, I’ve been following their posts closely, comparing their experience with the experience that our customers have when building their own home - the only difference being Alison & Paul are building a site-built home, whereas our customers (obviously) are building a Modular Home.
Over the past two weeks or so there Alison & Paul were trying to figure out if they needed an architect to build their house - or if the contractor could use their simple drawings done on paper - well as you may have figured, they realized they needed an architect. They expected to spend about 15% of the cost of the home for architectural fees, for them, that number would be around $45,000, since they expected their home to cost about $300,000. When Alison and Paul met with their architect, he gave them a minimum price of $70,000! That was a MINIMUM!! Nonetheless, the architect didn’t seem to excited about working with them because they were working on a “small” (less than 4,000 square feet) home.
I was blown away by that! Right then and there, Alison and Paul could have saved over $70,000 if they built their home as a modular - why? Well, if you build a modular home with The Modular Home Group, architectural fees are included in the cost of your home, and when they are broken down on an invoice, the fees usually don’t total more than a few thousand dollars.
Why is that?
Well, unlike site-built construction, Modular Homes have to be built to certain dimensions and constructed using certain materials and using certain methods, so each Modular Home Manufacturer has to do full scale architectural drawings for each house they manufacture, this includes drawings which contain the elevations, floor plan, basement layout, electrical, plumbing and mechanical layout, as well as roof plans, and a few other odds and ends. This includes drawings which may be from a manufactuers stock layout, or plans which started with a simple layout written on a placemat - we have the capability to do a completely custom home - the way you want it - AND do with out the outrageous architectural fees!
Many people ask us, “Do i need to hire an architect to build my modular home?” and the answer is quite simply, “No!” all the money saved on architectural fees can be either put into upgrades in the house, or just money that can be put back in your pocket!
I’m looking forward to the next seeing what other problems Alison & Paul may experience by building their home site-built instead of modular, and I’m sure there will be plenty!
-Andrew
Add comment March 19th, 2007