You’ll hear a lot about the best tips to find custom builders in Napa. They often include getting testimonials and multiple full quotes. There’s one thing that you can do to help determine whether a builder is worth choosing or not.
It’s all about visiting homes that the builders have worked on. You want to see their finished product, and if you can, there’s one step further you can go.
Talk to the People Who Own the Homes
This can seem intrusive, but one great option is to talk to the people who own the homes. Not everyone will want to talk to you, but if you make it clear that you’re looking at hiring the custom builders in Napa, you may find that more are willing to share the good and bad about their current places.
When you talk to the homeowners, you’ll find they can share a few details that are often left out of testimonials. They can also be a little more blunt about situations that arose, which they may not have done during the project. After all, people don’t necessarily want to risk a builder retaliating.
You’ll want to find out if the homeowners have had to hire someone else to fix problems. Were there extra costs that they didn’t expect? Did the project take longer or did everything run smoothly from start to finish?
Search for the One-Off Builds for Custom Builders in Napa
Some builders will have primarily worked on large new home developments. These aren’t really custom builds. They stick to a plan that a bigger investment company had. Sure, the lot is custom, but the houses inside all look the same.
You want to find buildings that they’ve done as one-off projects. This will help you find out more about how long it took specifically. You want to hear the good and the bad about the project from start to finish. People who have had their homes custom built will have seen the stages throughout, especially if they lived local.
There are some customer builders in Napa moving from the big developments to one-off projects. In this case, you may end up being a guinea pig. You can always turn to the bigger developments and talk to people there. While they wouldn’t have seen the full process or had much say in the style, they will know more about any problems with the property now.
The best thing you can do is talk to homeowners who have had their homes custom built. Sure, you can talk to friends who have had builders in for smaller projects, but building a home takes a lot more time and patience. There are elements to the build that aren’t necessarily a thing with extensions or updates, so you want to talk to people who have been through the whole thing.
By doing that, you’ll cut out some of the work of reading through testimonials and reviews. In fact, this one step is much more valuable than asking for reviews for custom builders in Napa.