If I had a dollar for every time I heard, “Yeah, but the other contractor is telling us stick framing is cheaper and they can do exactly the same thing that Pacific Homes does,” I would be long retired and living in the Bahamas.
I have heard this same thing on more than one occasion however I think it is even more powerful in my most recent interaction.
Approximately 4 years ago Pacific Homes provided a custom home package for our clients in the Berkeley area of California. The project went great; the client spoke with me almost on a daily basis going over miscellaneous details and progress reports. He could not get over how in a matter of a couple of weeks, crews were installing windows, doors and roofing already. I would hear from him often on how phenomenal the building material was and that never had he seen such true and high quality framing material. After approximately 5 ½ months, his custom home was completed and he happily moved his family into their new Pacific Home.
A little more than a year and a half ago I received a call from the same client saying that they had sold their home and decided to build in a different area of California. He was eager to use Pacific Homes with our advanced 3-D modeling and Pacific SmartWall® technology again. He would need to rent a house during the construction because they had to be out of their sold home in just 1 month. Since his last large custom Pacific Home took less than half a year to build he would only need to rent for a short time. Shortly after he received our proposal for his new home I received a phone call from him saying they’d really like to build with Pacific Homes again but the contractor they hired said it would be cheaper for him to stick frame AND he can provide the exact same thing that Pacific Homes would in the same length of time. I asked our previous client how much difference in cost it was going to be using our Pacific Homes package and he said that the contractor told him it was going to be $15,000 more.
After much discussion, the client was assured by the contractor that he would get exactly the same thing in the same time frame as the last house. So the client felt the “extra” $15,000 could go towards upgrading a few things in the home. I wished him all the best and asked only that he call me back after he moved into the home and let me know how everything worked out.
About a month ago, approximately 15 months after his project started, I received his phone call. The call started out with, “Well Ray, I guess you were right, things were not the same! We just moved in the house and it took about a year longer than our last house with Pacific Homes.”
He continued,
- The quality of the lumber was a much lesser grade compared to your product
- We took three dumpsters of waste from the site in comparison to only one with our Pacific Home.
- Coordination between the rough openings for windows and doors was not properly done and because rough openings were incorrect it caused us two months delay in receiving the windows that we had to pay for TWICE! The framing contractor needed to return and adjust most of the openings. Because the framing contractor moved on to another job, it took over a month to get them back to fix the problem.
- So many of the small details that were not correct or did not work on the plan did not get caught. Because of this they did not get picked up until it was too late and things needed to be rebuilt on this house, unlike during your 3-D modeling on our last house with Pacific Homes.
- We had to rent for an additional year.
- We had to pay the construction mortgage on the new house for a year without living in it.
- We had to pay additional insurance, property taxes and utilities on two homes for a year.
So what their contractor promised was $15,000 in savings ended up costing them well over that and a year of their life. Although it was reassuring to hear that I was completely honest with my client from the beginning, the sad fact is, Pacific Homes is only sympathetic towards our former customers for the unnecessary headache and financial strain that they endured.
As we know, most people learn from their experiences and in this case the client has now recommended his father-in-law to build with Pacific Homes on his upcoming new home as the only way to build!
There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and people who consider price only are this man’s lawful prey. – John Ruskin
Ray Greene
Related:
Prefabricated vs. Stick Frame – The question often is, “Is pre-fabricated or panelized construction time saving and cost effective in comparison to stick frame construction?” Forintek, a division of FP Innovations says, “YES!” They’ve constructed two identical projects, side by side.