Hi all,
My wife and I are currently in the process of getting a home built, and we were lucky enough to find a property with room for quite a nice back yard for surprisingly low cost.
We wanted to get a deck built so we would have somewhere to relax and for our future kids to play, but my wife recently found out that the agency building our home takes a commission for the deck and the carport and a few other things and then just contracts another agency to make those for them, meaning that we ultimately end up paying more than if we had just hired a deck-building company directly.
So her thought is that we drop those from the design and get them installed separately afterwards.
However… I have noticed that no matter what changes we make the final price of the entire build always seems to balance back to just about the upper limit we gave them for what we can spend on the house; whether that is by negotiating discounts on our behalf to stay within the budget, or by new design elements dragging the price up slightly any time we have made savings in another place.
I'm fairly certain if we remove the deck and carport they will just find a way to upsell us to put that price back on anyway, and we will ultimately have to go over-budget to get the deck and carport installed afterwards.
I was wondering if anyone else has any experience with this and could offer any advice?
by PotentialSpaceman