2 The World of Custom Home Building | First Choice Podcast w/ Drew Homola and Landon Johnston

In this podcast episode, Landon Johnston and Drew Homola discuss the topic of custom home building and the importance of understanding a client's vision. They distinguish between different types of custom homes, such as semi-custom and track homes, and emphasize the need for a truly custom experience. The hosts explain their process of getting to know clients by using questionnaires and meetings to gather information about their preferences and lifestyle. They also highlight the significance of the selection process, where they help clients make choices based on their needs and budget. The hosts share their challenges in keeping clients on track with their budget and ensuring they get the house they desire. They stress the importance of being an authority figure for clients and guiding them through the decision-making process. Overall, the podcast focuses on the importance of understanding clients' visions and tailoring the building process to their specific needs and budget.

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Transcript

Hey guys, welcome to the First Choice podcast. I'm Landon Johnston. And I'm Drew Homola.

So we're going to be talking about all things real estate building and real estate investments. Hopefully we can gain a little insight to our listeners about what's going on in our market. Okay, so there's custom home building and then there's custom home building.

Yeah, I know. Loading symbol in front of your face. Some people are like, oh, we build custom homes and simply alternating trim color or changing a few things around isn't really a custom home.

Maybe it should be phrased like there's a custom home where you customize a few things and then, oh, it's a custom home. And then there's like a custom designed home where it's specifically tailored. There's like a track home, semi custom, and then there's custom.

And maybe I guess what you're saying is sometimes people can say they're a custom home builder, but really they're more of a semi custom. Right. There's a few options that people get to make or some choices, a few selections they can make, but it's not really tailored exactly to how they want the house.

Right. It's like, hey, you can pick two colors here or you can pick this one style of trim and you can choose to have masonry on the front or not. So that could be like a semi custom home or even a track home where people are allowing a couple choices.

Yeah, truly custom home. For example, us, we're a custom home builder. We take people from a lot of times before they even have land, go through the land buying process, which then helps us design the house, which then helps us choose our finishes and selections.

And in the end you're able to come up with a budget based off of all those things that's a custom home, an actual accurate budget because the design of the house has been specifically tailored for the land, specifically tailored for what they're going for. Every factor has been evaluated and accounted for right out the gate. Yeah, think about like somebody who, let's just pretend loves soccer, right? And they want a soccer field for their kids on their property.

We're not going to go buy a lot that's on side of a hill. Right? Right. So it starts right in the beginning.

Our custom homes. The involvement of the builder needs to start in the very beginning. So it's a truly custom experience and tailored specifically for that person.

I know this is a key part when it comes to designing and all this, but really getting to know someone's vision, what they're after. I use vision as just sort of a general term to get inside a person's head. How do you go about doing that? Or how would you if someone asked you what processes do you have in place so that you can understand where I'm coming from? How do you get inside someone's head and really feel them out? Is it just spending time with them and getting to know them? How do we do it? Specifically, we have processes like questionnaires and yeah, we do meetings first.

What would happen is we'd send a questionnaire that says, I don't know, there's like ten questions on it and they're basic questions that do a surface level, what would you call it? Like evaluation, like a surface level. I don't even know what I'm trying to say. The questionnaire essentially will get a few basic details that helps us start forming our mind around what these people are all about.

How many bedrooms, how many bathrooms, square footage. What's the main purpose of the house? Yeah, main purpose of the house. I mean, is a person going to be entertaining in it? Are they going to have maybe a mother in law living with them? Do they have lots of cars? Then we can say, okay, based off of how they've answered this question, they want us or these questions, they essentially are looking for around a $2 million house that's 3500 sqft.

With a mother in law suite and a six car garage fenced for horses on six acres. Then when we meet in person for the first time, we kind of have that already in our head. Right.

And we even have some ideas that we've come up with or perhaps a house plan or two to kind of get the idea started. Yeah. And a lot of times when they come in, we're able to have our conversation more efficiently and effective because we've had this questionnaire ahead of time, hey, I understand these are all your wants and needs and we want to see what we can do to get you there.

We don't say that. There are certain people who say, oh, I'm the most expensive builder around, and they sell value off of price. Well, we want to sell value off of their needs.

If they have a $5 million budget but they're actually only looking to spend, say, well, let's say they have a $5 million budget, but we can get everything they want in 3 million, why wouldn't we? We're not going to tell them, oh, yeah, well, we're the most expensive people. You have 5 million, well plan on spending six. So we want to design our service around exactly what they want and to meet their budget.

And a huge part of that is understanding their vision, knowing what they want, knowing what they're going after. Yeah, that's awesome. Absolutely.

I know. We have two questionnaires that we have set up within our company. One is sort of a preliminary meeting questionnaire that's meeting the people for the first time, like you described, getting our head in the game a little bit, kind of coming better prepared.

The second one is a bit more specific, but still pretty general as far as the planning goes. And that is what type of foundation are you after? Do you want a walkout basement. So, narrowing down their vision.

Can you tell us a little bit more about the selections process? Specifically with perhaps our consultation service or when we start a build kind of going through? Just give us a general idea on what that looks like. Yeah. So the selection process is one, it can be a really daunting thing for the customer because there's millions of products to choose from.

Right. But we want to start with in the beginning. Like okay, for example, if a person has dogs, we're not going to advise them to get a soft heart, soft wood, like a pine floor or like a Douglas Fur floor.

Right. Because a dog will run through there a few times and the next thing they know, the floor is trash. We want to start our selection process based off of their daily activities or their daily habits that they're doing.

If they love cooking, we're going to ensure that they have a high end appliance set in a big kitchen. If they have kids with muddy feet running in and out, we're going to ensure that they are guided towards a floor that's durable. If they have really high end taste and they're not into entertaining, we can then tailor their needs that way.

Right. So what we want to do is if we have a good overview of their lifestyle, then we ask for them to send us some basic pictures of their style. So we have the lifestyle down.

We know what their activities are and their habits are. Go online somewhere and send us some pictures that you found. We don't even necessarily need to know the brands of the products you're looking at.

Just an idea. Yeah. Go on, Pinterest.

Start grabbing stuff that you like. Yeah, grab a bunch of pictures. The internet has been a big deal for this because people can pick all their stuff and then if they don't even know what it is, we can figure it out.

Right. But based off of those pictures that the customer sends, we can then go to our suppliers and have them go with us. We will go to the plumbing supplier and say, hey, these are some of the fixtures that our client has picked out.

What do you have that's like this? And this is the customer's budget. Same with tile cabinets, wood, wood flooring trim. With our consultation process, we actually are with the customer and we'll go through each item.

And sometimes we can get multiple things with one supplier. Right. We can do cabinets, countertops of tile, hardwood, things like that, sometimes through one supplier.

And they can actually build a design board and visualize all that stuff together. Hold the wood up against the tile and see how that looks or see how the countertop will contrast with the wood or whatever and be able to touch and feel it. I think that's really important for a lot of people who are visual simply throwing something on paper or looking at a sketch of something is not going to cut it.

They want to be able to touch it, hold it, feel it, compare it, hold it in the light, sniff it. Yeah, exactly. And part of that too is having one of our staff there to say, I want you to know that this is not going to be fitting in your budget.

Just so you know. Feel free and pick it if you want. But by choosing this, it's over our allowance amount that we have designated for this, whatever, say tile.

We have X amount, we have $10,000 in here for tile material and this is going to be bringing you in above that you can kind of adjust and help guide most people don't understand the effect of their decision. Right. Well it's only $1,000 more or it's only I mean I realize we're kind of splurging here.

It's a $10,000 deal. Well at the end of the project you're talking you could be $500,000 over budget. Yeah.

And we've definitely seen that, haven't we? I mean even something as minute as trim going from say a manufactured trim to some standardized wood trim or whatever that may in itself is not that big of an increase. The labor is more or less the same. Maybe one paints and the other one stains.

There's not a whole lot of difference there but yeah, it's quickly magnified over a bunch of little things. Yeah. The grand scheme of things they do add up and part of that too is the complexity of the design.

So say the trim guy on a real basic 30 x 40 foot by 40 foot house. His trim labor is probably going to be less than a house that's really complex and has a whole bunch of corners and angles and whatever. Might even be smaller but just more complex.

Yeah. So you say, okay, well the trim going from wood to sorry, from painted MDF trim to wood is say whatever the physical cost of that material is, say one $200 more or whatever. But the labor to install it because of the complexity of the design could be even more.

So all these things, they become instinctual over time and we don't expect the average person just to know that when they walk into a store. Right. So it's good to have somebody on site and help them guide them through that process of selecting there.

Right. In your opinion, is it pretty common that people will naturally just sort of go over their budget when they're going through a selections process or when they're designing their house or is it pretty easy to keep people on track? I haven't figured out how to do this to be honest with you. But it's a challenge.

I don't know why. If you hold up two pieces of tile and they're very similar, it's more common than you would believe that they'd go with the more expensive one. And you could say, well, this one is, whatever, $5 a square foot, and this one's $7 a square foot.

And they're basically the same. For some reason, that more expensive one stands out to be nicer. Yeah.

And bearing in mind that these are both high quality products, it's not like one's a piece of junk and the other one's standard. Right. It's like, hey, this is very high quality.

And then this is the Taj Mahal of products. Right. This is the best product out there, and they're very similar.

And here you're going to go pick the expensive one on every single selection and then wonder why the budget is over. It's real. Yeah.

And I don't know why. It's like a mental trick or something. Maybe we could just start saying that things are more expensive when they're actually the cheaper one.

There you go. We could just use some reverse psychology. And the bottom line is we don't want people to go over budget because then what can happen is they maybe are not able to afford the house that they had hoped for.

So somehow we have to try to keep them in line. Right. Right.

And that itself is really challenging because we need to be their guide, but also ensure that they're actually going to be able to get what they want. Well, something you said earlier, and I think it's a smart way of putting it, is if someone's hiring us for a consultation service, they are paying us to be their authority. They have hired us to keep them in line.

Right. Yeah. And so if we just simply give them all the rope they want and let them hang themselves with it, we're not doing them any good either.

They might be able to pick out all the stuff that they want, but if they can't afford it, then they can't have anything. Right? Right. Yeah.

I mean, that's a prime example. I love snowmobiling, and before I had bought my first snowmobile, I was looking for one. I didn't really know anything about them.

And as I'm looking around, I'm wanting these people to tell me all about it. I want them to tell me the downside of it. I want them to say, well, here, if you go with this one, you're really not going to be able to get off the trail.

And if you go with this one, you can get off the trail. But the thing is unreliable. This is totally made up.

But I'm just saying that I wanted people to say, this is ultimately what you need for what kind of riding you're going to be doing. Right. And you know what? I never really even got that.

It was more like, well, here's this model, and here's this model, and this one does this thing, and this one does this thing. And what about me? I need to know about how this benefits me. Question should have been what do you want to do, Drew? Yeah, I'm the buyer and I want to know how this affects me.

The facts of the snowmobile are important, but it's more important to know how that snowmobile is going to benefit me and how it's going to make my life better. Right. I found that when I was buying a snowmobile that was actually hard to it was hard to get that consultation that I hope to give to customers yes.

Even when they don't know to ask the question themselves. I think this is something that can separate an amateur from a professional. When it comes to custom building, we should already have a list at least 90% accurate on the questions we're 99% sure they're going to ask.

We should already know what's probably going through their head. We should already have an idea on the questions they're going to have in certain areas, and we should most likely have an answer for them right out the gate. Right? Yeah.

Hit me with a question as far as, like, the consultation process. You're the sales guy, right? Yes. So what are some of the difficulties in consulting some clients on the selection process and everything, picking up a plan? Well, okay, a couple of big points.

Number one is budget. Trying to keep people in line with their budget is really challenging. Like Drew was talking about earlier, people like to get all over the place and they seem to always pick out the most expensive product.

The second item I say that is most difficult is people don't really know what they want out the gate. Particularly with plan design, it can be very difficult in pinning down something that they're ready to commit to. There's a huge variety of plans out there and so it really takes time to sit down and go through what they're really after, what their vision is, their land.

I think we talked about keeping all the variables in mind and having a plan is the first step to even doing anything. But it's also probably one of the biggest decisions is coming up with that house design. So that's a challenge.

You want to hear something interesting? So I've built a few of my own houses, right. And I can get most of my ideas down and have the general idea of selections. And I can figure out what land I like and the position of the house.

But when it comes down to the nitty gritty details like what tile, what size windows, because it's my own house, it's way harder. I can guide somebody through that easy. Right.

I can help somebody be like, you know what? A twelve x twelve secondary bedroom is about as small as I would go, but that's an acceptable size. This window for this specific spot with these mountain views, I would go with this size window. And this type of siding is awesome for what you want to spend.

I can help people get through all that. And then when it comes down to my own house, it's actually way harder. What do you think it is with this height of ceiling? What size should the room dimension be? Because you don't want it to feel like a tunnel, but you also don't want to feel like you're inside an empty skyscraper.

Maybe that's part of what customers are experiencing is the same thing as they could probably build a vision of what they want, but then they get real unsure because they know that this is their house. They all sudden start doubting their selections. Right.

Yeah. Having the confidence behind a decision. If they don't have any confidence behind any decision, they're just not going to make any decisions.

Right. They're going to lean on everything, on what you recommend. And the thing is, the longer it takes for somebody to come to a decision, the less happy they're going to be about it.

So if there was a way to ensure that they were making the right decision and they were making it quickly and they didn't have to think about it for a long time, they're actually going to end up with something that they like better. Yeah. If you give them a million options, it seems like they get hung up sort of this analysis paralysis state, but you're like, hey, here's your budget, this is what you were after.

We'd really recommend this. Here's a few options for you. Here's some color selections.

And yes, the sky is the limit, but I think this is about where you want to be. This is the ballpark. You should pick one.

Oh, okay. And so they go pick one and on we go. Yeah.

And sometimes I've actually had people they would definitely how would you say it? Sometimes people want to have unlimited options in their head. Like they think they want unlimited options. Well, this is a custom home and we want every single option that's available.

And that's true. You should get exactly what you want, but generally we want to narrow down instead of saying the entire world is yours to choose from, this is based off of all of the things that we know. This is the direction that we should be going instead of this direction.

Right? Yeah. Giving them too much I don't think is helpful. Imagine if you'd walked into that snowmobile shop using your example earlier and they had 500 snowmobiles of every shape, size, make and model, and they just started rattling off all this info and they kept walking down the line telling you different.

By the time you got halfway through them, you'd be like, I don't know, dude, I just want to stink somewhere out. I just want to go home. Right? Yeah.

What are you after? Well, I want a mountain ride. Okay, let's go over to this section. We've narrowed it down.

Okay. Are you specific on a color? No. Okay.

We've narrowed it down more. Whatever. Go through these different things and just try to cut the big chunks out of the way.

Yeah. Are there any other tips that you guys would share with potential clients, somebody coming into the process or if they should do their own research and try to figure out a lot of this on their own? I think doing your own research is fine. Coming up with ideas that you want, like we were talking about the pitchers thing.

Coming up with a pinterest picture that you have a vision on some product or whatever, that's fine. It's easy, though, to become your own Internet expert and think that you understand all the ins and outs just based off of your emotions when you're selecting a product. Well, I really see how this is coming together and this is the vision, and that's great.

It's fine to have that vision, but understanding that there are certain products that are available in this area, or there are certain products that have a big turnaround time, or there's all these different little things that are not considered when you're going through a vision. One thing that I've experienced is somebody moves here from out of state. Let's just let's just say somebody moves here from Louisiana.

There's a lot of moisture in Louisiana, right? Certain certain areas. The climate is different. It's warm.

I mean, it could be a different country, basically from Sheridan, Wyoming, a totally different climate. People have had experiences through their life. Oh, well, my grandma had this issue with her house, and, well, that issue came because of all of their circumstances at that place in time.

Right, right. A lot of times people live their life based off of their history. Well, I know I'm never doing this to my house because back where we used to live, this was an issue.

Water in the crawl space or mold or termites or how about moss on the roof? I mean, there's all these issues that people experience in their life, and that helps dictate their design of their house. And then they come here and they're like, nothing's even the same. Right.

We're generally a super dry climate, and we get cold winters. Everything is different. Right.

And so we've actually had a number of times where we're building a house for someone in there, and they say, oh, how come you're not doing this? Because back where I'm from, we do things this way because of these reasons. Or we don't use this product because it's proven to fail. Well, your climate is way different.

This is an excellent product for our climate and our geographic location, and here's the track record for that. Yeah, I think the rule of thumb there this is an age old adage of when in Rome, do as the Romans do. If everyone in your neighborhood is using a product and it's holding up and working, it's a reliable product.

Well, and kind of my point here, too, is that sometimes people can do the same thing, but with the internet, they find an article that they, oh, well, according to this article, we have to be building this way. Well, maybe that house was maybe that builder is from Louisiana, for example. Right.

Or Alaska or Maine or who knows where they're from, right? Right. Bottom line is, whoever put that article out, they're probably right in their opinions or their facts, but they may or may not apply to where we're at for our specific situation. Right.

I think having the experience in your area is where you should draw your recommendations from. Simply going off of some Internet guys opinion or whatever. Yeah.

Like you said, might be might be pertinent for his area, but doesn't apply to everything. One of the things that we've gotten quite a bit is, oh, we really like hardy siding. And I don't mean to trash hardy, but it doesn't hold up well in our climate.

We get really cold winter snaps. Here's an example. We went from 60 above to negative 20 in a matter of few days.

Like three days. Yeah. That was last year around Christmas.

I don't know if you remember. I think it was like three days before Christmas is like 60 degrees, and then the day after Christmas, it was like negative 20. Wham.

So you had in three days, you had a massive you had a difference of 80 degrees. Yeah. And then the wind picks up, so you hit concrete, fiber, cement siding just does not perform well in that.

Right. It does perform well in, say, a wet location or other type of scenarios, but you get that massive temperature difference and then the wind picks up and you got a 50 or 60 mono wind with snow smashing on your house. And we've quite literally have seen hardy siding fall off of walls before.

We've been fortunate for us. I mean, we actually have not had that happen to us because we don't actually use it, but other people around town, that has happened. And so there's no builders around here who use hardy anymore.

Yeah. I've even had conversation with suppliers that I don't know if we'd recommend that for this area, but it's a good product in other places. Yes.

Not knocking the product. It's just not for this area. Yeah.

Are there any other products are there any other products that have a similar thing? Like, I don't know, flooring would even be a thing, but as far as the moisture or trim, does LP siding perform well here? Yeah, it does. LP siding, whether it's the horizontal lap or if it's vertical batten board, is awesome. I mean, it seems to hold up really well.

I think everyone can attest to that. So many people use it around here, and I would say it's probably the best value product, really. It's not the most durable, obviously.

Like, you can't beat brick or whatever. But as far as a bang for your buck, I don't think you can beat that in this area. Right.

Just like you said, it is really durable. It holds up really good in the wind. It doesn't have as much fluctuation in size, heat and cold.

Wow. What am I saying? Like temperature swing. Yeah.

Or moisture or whatever. Which causes expansion and contraction. Yeah.

So there is a lot of good things about that and it's similar price to Lake Hardy or something like that. But one thing that I know about is when you're choosing your selections and a person has these beliefs carried on from the Internet or from where they used to live, and then they would like to get more information about that product, we don't want to inform them or guide them in a way that's not accurate. We don't want to say, oh, that product is just trash, period.

Right. Our goal is to gain knowledge to that person. I realize that you've done this in the past and you did this back in Texas or in Maine or wherever they're from here in this area.

We do this method to our construction because of these reasons. Right. Educate them more really than instead of just, oh, your opinion and your experiences are invalid don't apply here.

That sucks. That's stupid. Yeah.

Moving on. No, absolutely. I think a huge part of sort of helping people understand that or looking at it from a different point of view or just adhering to this when in Rome does the Romans do is getting to really spend time with them.

Understand what they're after. Get them to know, like and trust you build a relationship. And so then they can lean on your word comfortably and confidently and like, hey, I've spent a lot of time with this guy.

He clearly has the experience. They've built a lot of houses over the years. They've done X, Y and Z.

They've lived in the area their whole life. They know what they're talking about in this area. Right.

So that, I think is important. And I say that because everybody out there can put on a lip service or a big smile and talk you into a product or talk you into a method. But at the end of the day, if they're not working with you and educating you and truly trying to understand your vision, they're really not doing what they should be doing, in my opinion.

One thing that you hit on a little bit and I don't know if it was intentional or not, but probably not. So you mentioned no like and trust. And our biggest goal for building this consultation process that we bring people through for a custom home is to allow us to build a natural relationship so we know, like and trust each other.

By the time we're done with our consultation process, which will generally take maybe even a couple of months, we've already. Been interacting for quite some time without having a construction project underway. Right? Yes.

It's kind of a safe playing field for both parties to really fill each other out and see. Okay. By the time we're done with that, we know if this is a good fit for us and sometimes we get done and we realize this project isn't going to work because all kinds of reasons.

Right. It could be visions were offset from budgets or it could be they never found the right land. Or maybe they've in the process discovered they actually don't even like Wyoming.

Or maybe who knows? Right. Right. Not every project works out, but our consultation process is meant to figure that out before we're actually under construction.

Yes. Basically a big filter or sort of a test run, if you will, still getting value, they're still getting their plans figured out, their selections all ironed out and everything, but it's non committal. They're not in the middle of a build and now the walls are already framed.

But oh shucks. We realize X, Y and Z and we don't want to continue anymore. But we have to because we're now in the middle of this build.

I guess that kind of ties back into making the selections and making sure that the products are right for the build and all that stuff gets chosen before we're actually right. Yeah. The ability for someone to go into a product bearing in mind that they don't do this every day, or maybe this is their first product or whatever, they're completely new to this.

They are not the experts in the field. But for them to be able to step into a project with 100% confidence, like, hey, I know exactly what we're doing now. I totally understand it.

I get it. These products make sense. There's a few things here that I may be not quite so sure on, but I totally trust my contractor.

Having that confidence and that ability to just be like, it's going to go through, it's going to be great. That's what we're after. Yeah.

And it has to be natural. Yes. Not like, well, let me elbow you in this direction and make sure that you understand this and force them down that path.

Yeah. Well, you got any more questions? No, I think you guys covered it all, the whole building process. So first choice will be walking with you as a client the whole way through, right? Yeah.

Well, until next time. That's it? That's it.

Anyway, so that's a wrap for today, guys. I hope you enjoyed and got some value out of what we were talking about and we're going to do again next week, so stay tuned. Take care.