Contract

When we met with the agent to go over the potential contract, it turned out, the builder was unable to get license to build the same floorplan a second time, so he had enlisted an architect to design a very similar floorplan. We actually liked the majority of the architects changes better than the original plan, the house was 100sq ft larger, and the builder would build it for exactly the same price that the house next door had sold for. In fact we were able to make a few small changes that knocked almost $2,000 off of the purchase price.

We had a lawyer review the contract, who (unsuprisingly) notified us that it was written with priority to the builder's interests.  We negotiated a few small changes and inclusions to make the contract represent our interests at least a little more fairly and signed. The builder's really hold all of the cards in these situations, and legal documents make me nervous to begin with, but the contract does protect us from builder negligence and mistakes and the only real repercussions come if we break our part of the deal.  It's hard to argue too hard with that logic.

Signing a contract to build a house is obviously a huge deal. In a lot of ways it's very very scary. Although the builder is financing the majority of the build, we are still putting a large sum of money down and, as I mentioned, if you can't fulfill your end of the bargin you can lose a great deal of that money.  When you spend your life's savings you tend to wonder if you're spending it on the right thing. However, we feel like we did our homework. The offer on the original house came much too quickly. Having an extra 6 weeks to research property values, tour houses (both existing and new) and work with the builder and sales agent/realtor made us a feel a lot more confident in our decision. Also the builder has proven to be very reasonable and easy to work with. We're able to customize and upgrade the floor plan and finishes without any hassle and we're being given builder cost for any upgrades or changes we're making.