Home Builders Are People

During my 17 years of looking at houses, built and planned, I’ve met and talked to many, many home builders. Generally speaking they belong to the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB). In fact, the one who wrote the Foreword to my first book was an ex-president of the NAHB.

And believe me, builders are as varied and unalike as in any other industry. There are good ones and bad, successful and not, ones you’d like to work with and ones you should steer clear of. There are builders that build hundreds of homes, others that do one at a time, ones that are out there with a  hammer going at it, and their counterparts who see it only as a business.

From the perspective of the person who’s buying a house, there’s every reason to be super careful. A house is a multi-faceted creation with many places where things must be done right if the end result is to be a home someone will want to live in. There are laws and rules that are supposed to protect the home buyer and to a limited extent they do. But these rules do not consider the functional aspects of a house, how it is to be used by the home owner.

For example, there may be rules about what size wire is to be used in the electrical system but there won’t be any that say where switches have to go. So you’ll find switches that are where you expect to find them, like next to the door you just came in. So when you’re looking at a house to buy to live in it’s very much up to you, the buyer, to look out for such things and decide if it’s something you want to put up with or to something you’ll have to have changed before or after you buy the house...if, in fact, you do.

On the other hand, a major concern of the builder is that he makes a house that people will want to buy---light switch location is but one of many things he needs to be concerned about. He will surround himself with subcontractors who are supposed to be “experts” in their particular field. The builder’s first need is to meet codes and regulations and he’ll be sure that his subcontractors know how to do this. (He’ll find out quickly enough about this when the inspectors come by to check things out.) But there is no inspector to look out for things that may not be good for the home user...unless they are covered by code.

So what we find are builders and the houses they build that range from excellent to awful in terms of “user friendliness”.  And it is totally on the back of the homebuyer to sort out the good builders from the not so good. Don’t expect any help from your real estate agent. If they see something that should have been differently, their options are to ignore it, try to get the builder to change it, or to point it out to the prospective buyer and let them decide if they want to go ahead anyway.  Most agents won’t do anything that might “kill a sale”, so it’s not in their ususal operating mode to say anything at all. This leaves it up to the buyers to watch out for themselves.

User friendliness in a home is the subject of my book “Better Houses, Better Living” as described at http://www.betterhousesbetterliving.com. Looking at the book is almost guaranteed to help you get that better home you deserve.