Buying A Home
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Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Building a home...come in!
We are going at 1 today to talk with the lender and give our earnest money to the builder. We will obviously have to approve any last minute changes to our contract. We want to take out the refrigerator (we didn't like the style) and the window in the garage.
The fridge would take money off our contract, but the window did not. Would it be appropriate to ask for vaulted ceilings in the master in lieu of taking out the window in the garage? Everybody tells me I should ask for free upgrades but I'm not sure how to go about that.
Would that work???
Re: Building a home...come in!
"The House We Built."
A journey of building the dream.
Just ask the builder for the upgrades. The worse they can say is no.
We are building a house in FL, ground breaking is next month. We asked for a little over $5000 in upgrades and builder approved everything. We recently changed to an all cash deal and the builder offered us another $4000 to put toward additional upgrades.
We were told builder would not negotiate on base price of house but would be willing to accept our upgrade requests.
I agree with the PPs.
My builder (Ryland) gave a lot of free upgrades and incentives, but they would not substitute any upgrades. For instance, we wanted to not include any kitchen appliances so we could choose our own [different brand] and apply the value of the included appliances towards a different upgrade but they said no.
That's our builder! What model did you choose?
Cool! Let me know if you have any questions about them.
Their models are different everywhere. Our floorplan is called Montclare.
Sign up for their email alerts and watch the sales. They usually do one sale a month offering about $20,000 in concessions or free upgrades. Also ask them to waive the lot premium. You do have to use their lender in order to get the concessions (they sell the loan to Bank of America immediately after closing).
We had a few snags but overall they were very, very easy to work with.
We found their prices on structural upgrades to be much lower than the cost of doing the same thing on our own later (bonus room, finished basement, upgraded elevation) while their prices on other upgrades was quite a bit more than we could do on our own (hardwood floors, stone countertops).
Our appraisal came in $8K low and they lowered the appraisal price without us even having to ask.
We've been in our place for just over 2 years. They've been great at supporting us and answering questions even after closing.
I hope you negotiated before you gave earnest money. Our builder was much more open to making changes before we paid up. We asked them to price out all of the upgrades that we thought we wanted, and negotiated from that point. We got a good hunk off doing this.
We ended up getting $13,000 off the total price and an extra $5,000 in upgrades/closing costs. They will be paying for our points and our PMI (not included in those numbers) and our attorney is reviewing the paperwork, making a couple changes as we speak.
Woo!
I looked up your model and I am SOO beyond jealous. They don't offer ANYTHING like that .. that cheap up here. And that big!! Our 1800 sq ft 4 bed home came in around 190 and that's with money off!!
Try to develop a good relationship with your project manager and your Construction Manager if you can.
When we walked into the design center I had a 50% off coupon towards cabinet level upgrades. I ended up doing a lot more customization in the kitchen but I was told that the coupon only applied to a 50% off discount to move up the "levels"
So if upgrading to level 1 was $5000 it would instead be $2500...but that the coupon couldn't be applied towards specific cabinets I wanted (spice fillers, building up to the ceiling, bigger crowns, etc...)
When I got the price in on my cabinets, I turned it down. My PM e-mailed me with an "adjusted" the price by taking 50% off the total upgrade charge of $15K.
They also allowed me to order my own appliances through them besides what was offered at the Design Center. I came in with model numbers and they got me a price minus a credit for what I took out.
I've pretty much found that if you tell them you're not going to upgrade through them because they're charging too much, they tend to bend on the pricing...the only thing they wouldn't budge on was tile.
Everything is negotiable. Ask, ask, ask for what you want and have good reason. We are a few days away from signing and have received the following so far: $35k off base price, extended closing date (6 weeks later than schedule), PMI buy down (I highly recommend this), intrest rate lock option, free deck, no cost for adding daylight windows to the basement, lower price on cabinet upgrades, lower price on countertop upgrades, and a few other design center options for free. I think the financing options are key! But regardless, they have a bottom line and it's up to you to get creative on how to get them as close as possible to it.