You’re in the market for a new home and want a truly “new” home. No resale for you and yours! Whether’s a family, retirement, multi-generational or vacation home, you and your household want what you want, fresh from scratch. But finding the right custom Florida home builder can be tricky. Some builders try to steer you to their interpretation of what you want rather than customize a plan to your specifications. ICI Homes won’t do that. We’re known as Florida’s Custom Home Builder, and we’re sharing tips on how to select the right builder for your new custom home.

Beware Being Rushed Through the Sales Process

It’s a good thing to remember about any decision, but particularly with such a large expense as building a home. Many builders work with a portfolio of floor plans and build the plan you select on the lot you buy. They also build a certain number of “spec” homes from those plans — homes that builders “speculate” will sell — to maintain inventory for quick sales. If a builder’s sales staff hastily steers you toward a “spec” house, or a certain floor plan they can frame up and finish in a couple months, they’re likely not interested in hearing you’d like to change what they’re offering. Which leads to…

Beware of Resistance to Floor Plan Changes

It’s a pain to deviate from the familiar. It’s also slower. We address this in the next section, but knocking out quality home after quality home on an brisk timetable is crucial for builders’ bottom lines. Pausing to craft a custom home, with its architectural changes, means extra labor and materials costs, plus the risk of expensive mistakes if crews don’t slow down. That’s a major reason some builders are stingy about changing their floor plans. They hope to talk you out of major changes, or into settling for the few tweaks they will make.

Beware Being Told It’ll Take Too Long

It’s a simple concept, but the faster builders can build and sell a home, the faster they can build and sell more homes. Speed = profit. Totally nothing wrong with that except when you, the prospective customer, want the custom home you want. And you’re fine with the process taking a bit longer. In fact, you expect it. Just remember that a leisurely, or unusually slow custom build doesn’t automatically mean a great custom build. Unless you’re awaiting exclusive or exotic materials to be shipped from overseas, or uncontrollable interruptions such as bad weather occur, a four-to-six-month timetable is the norm for most custom-home construction.

Talk to Us First

Here at ICI Homes, building custom homes is what we do. We’ve done it all over the state of Florida for more than three decades, and we’ll even build your custom home on your lot — using your floor plan or one of ours — as long as the project meets certain parameters. Our big library of award-winning plans are easily customizable, and our builders, architects and designers enjoy a good challenge. So bring us one! We’ll be happy to mix and match to your satisfaction.

Ready for a customized home-building experience? So is ICI Homes. Talk to us here.