The worst phone call I get is the one from someone whose builder has walked off. Frame up, sometimes lock up, then the calls stop being returned. They want to know what it costs to finish. It always costs more than finishing it properly would have from the start, because now I'm pricing someone else's work sight unseen and wearing the risk on every bit of it I can't inspect.
That call comes about twice a year. Every time, when we go back through it, the warning signs were sitting in the paperwork before a slab was poured. So here's what I'd actually look at if I were the one choosing, written by someone who's on the other side of the table and therefore has an obvious interest. Read it with that in mind.
This isn't about picking custom over a project home. That's a different question and it's covered in custom home vs project-home builder. This is about picking a person once you know what kind of build you want.
Start with the licence, and actually look it up
NSW licences residential builders, and you can search the register by name or licence number. It takes about a minute. What you're looking for isn't just that a licence exists, it's what class it is, whether the work you want is inside the scope of it, and whether there's anything sitting against it. A licence for a specific trade isn't a builder's licence, and a licence in someone else's name at the same company is worth a question.
While you're there, check the company. Ask how long that entity has been trading. A brand new company with an experienced name behind it is common and often perfectly fine. A brand new company that has replaced a couple of previous companies with the same director is a pattern.
Insurance is the other half. On residential work above the threshold, the builder has to take out home building compensation cover before taking any money, and the certificate has to be in your name for your job. Ask for it. Not a policy number in an email, the certificate. If the cover isn't there and the builder disappears, you're on your own for the finish and for defects. NSW Fair Trading's building and renovating pages set out the licensing and insurance side, and the NSW Building Commission is who you'd deal with if it went wrong.
Three quotes are useless if they're not the same scope
Everyone says get three quotes. Nobody says the hard bit, which is that three builders will quote three different scopes and the totals aren't comparable until you fix that.
I've had my price sit twenty per cent above someone else's on the same house and won the job anyway once the client went through both documents line by line. The difference wasn't margin, it was that the other quote had no site costs, no driveway, no landscaping, and a tiling allowance that wouldn't cover the bathroom floor. That's not dishonesty exactly. It's a headline number built to win a comparison, and the money arrives later as variations when you're too far in to walk.
So when you've got the quotes in front of you, do this. Find the allowances and read the actual dollar figures. Tiles, tapware, joinery, appliances, lighting, flooring. Then go look at what those figures buy at a real supplier. If the allowance is a third of what you'd spend, you've found the gap between the quote and the price.
Then check what's excluded. Site costs and rock are the classic ones, especially around here where plenty of blocks have sandstone a metre down. Service connections. Driveway, paths, fencing, letterbox, clothesline, landscaping. Council and certifier fees. Provisional sums, which are a polite way of saying we'll price this later.
And check the contingency. A build with no allowance for the unexpected is a build that will have variations, because every site has at least one surprise. I'd rather tell someone up front that we've carried an allowance than send them an invoice in month four.
The general shape of new build pricing, if you want the background, is in what it costs to build a house in NSW.
Questions I'd want asked of me
If someone sat across from me with this list, I'd think more of them, not less.
How many jobs are you running right now, and who's actually on site each day? A builder with eight jobs and one supervisor is a builder whose trades will be waiting. Ask who I'd ring if something's wrong on a Tuesday, and whether that person is the one quoting.
Are your trades the same crews each time? Consistent subbies are the single biggest predictor of quality I know of. Cheapest available carpenter every job means every job is a first job.
What's your program, and what's in it? Not a start date, a sequence. A builder who can talk you through slab, frame, roof, lock up, fit out and practical completion with rough durations attached has thought about your job. One who says "about nine months" hasn't. The realistic durations are in how long it takes to build a house.
What have you built near me, and can I speak to the owners? Not a testimonial. Names and numbers. And when you call, don't ask if they were happy. Ask what went wrong and how it was handled, because something always goes wrong, and the answer to that question tells you everything.
Who's handling the approval? If your job needs a full development application rather than complying development, the timeline changes a lot, and a builder who's vague about which path you're on hasn't done the homework. The difference is set out in CDC vs DA in NSW.
The signs that make me nervous
The clearest one is a big deposit. There are limits on what a builder can take up front on residential work, and a builder asking for a large slice before starting is either short of cash or funding another job with your money. Neither is your problem to solve.
Cash discounts. No written contract, or a contract that's two pages long. Pressure to sign this week because prices are going up. A quote with a lump sum and no breakdown at all. Reluctance to give you the insurance certificate. A price that's well under everyone else's with no explanation of why, which usually means the scope is thinner rather than the builder being cleverer.
The subtler one, and the one I'd weight most, is how they behave before they have your money. If the quote took three weeks and two reminders, if emails go unanswered, if the site meeting got moved twice, that's the best version of that builder you'll ever see. It doesn't improve after the contract is signed.
Small builder or big one
I run a small outfit, so take this with the appropriate amount of salt.
A big builder gives you process, a display home to walk through, a fixed catalogue of inclusions and the comfort of a large balance sheet. What you give up is access. You're a job number in a system, your variations go through an office, and the person who sold you the house is not the person building it.
A small builder gives you the opposite. You get the person who priced it standing on your slab. You get decisions made in an afternoon instead of a fortnight. What you give up is redundancy. If a small builder gets sick or overcommits, there's no bench. Which is why the questions about how many jobs are running and who's on site actually matter more with a small outfit than a large one.
Neither is safer in the abstract. The licensed, insured, well-referenced version of each is fine. The overloaded version of either will hurt you.
The last bit of advice, and it's the boring one
Read the contract. All of it, including the schedules, before you sign. Look for how variations are priced and approved, what the progress payment stages are and what has to be complete to trigger each one, how delays are handled and what counts as an excusable one, and what the defects liability period covers after handover. If you don't understand a clause, that's a reason to ask, not a reason to assume it's standard. Plenty of things in building contracts are standard and a few aren't.
The people who have good builds are almost never the ones who got the cheapest quote. They're the ones who did the licence search, read the allowances, rang two past clients and asked awkward questions early, when asking them was still cheap.
If you're at that stage and want a comparison price, have a look at how we run new homes and knockdown rebuilds, then call 0434 037 851 or send the plans through the contact page. Bring the other quotes with you. I'm happy to go through where the differences are, even if you end up going with someone else.
Want a hand with this at your place? Get a free quote or call 0434 037 851.