You met Builder A in the second paragraph. You could have just gone
with him then and saved everybody a bunch of trouble.

--
(||) Nehmo (||)

CWatters wrote:
I'm having a new one off house built. Here is how I selected a builder. I
may have the numbers slightly wrong but it went something like this....

Long before we needed to select one I was out looking at other projects. Any
nice house being built I would stop and chat to whoever was on site. Several
builders showed me around houses that they were working on. The quality
difference was amazing but so was their attitude. Usually I asked a few
questions that I half knew the answer to. Sometimes I got the answer "oh you
don't want to worry about that - we take care of all that". Humm. In such
cases their card was usually torn up before I got back in the car. Others
were much more responsive and they explained how they did things and why
they did it their way. Of around 12 builders I met, two impressed me enough
to go on the short list. One was very keen as he was just finishing a superb
house down the road from our site - lets call him Builder A.

For the short list my architect recommended two companies and my Quantity
Surveyor also recommended two. So we had six in total. We sent out an
initial letter to all six together with a 3D CAD drawing/render showing what
the house was like and a one page description. We asked them to let us know
if they were interested in bidding. I think 5 said yes and 1 declined.

I then went to visit the 5 builders. I asked to see two projects - a house
they had completed and a house in progress. I guess I spent about two hours
with each builder. I was able to cross one off the list - they mainly built
small estates of nearly identical design and of a lower standard than I was
looking for.

So we sent out four drawing packs (each of which contained about 40-50
drawings and a specification that ran to 50 pages). We asked for sealed bids
to be returned in 4 weeks (or was it 6 weeks?).

Most bids arrived on the last day. Three were nearly identical and were
within 1% of the figues that my QS had estimated. One was about 5% lower.
This bid was from builder A who had been keen to get the job and who had
impressed me when I met him. Due to the complexity of the project my
quantity surveyor wanted to check the winning bid to ensure nothing had been
missed - it hadn't so he got the job.

The project is now around 75% completed and our builder continues to
impress. The quality is about the best I've seen.