Med City Builders Blog
New Construction vs New Construction??
Might seem like a strange title, but this is a reality for the next few months in our market. Many of you are aware that we saw a major influx of building permits pulled trying to beat the new building codes as well as energy codes. The vast majority were builders speculating with model homes. Some of the pulled permits were informed homeowners making a logical decision. I’m not saying it was all bad as some of my customers even followed suit to save the extra costs. As things shake out, we are not seeing the major differences in costs that the builders were expecting. This brings me to my blogs title. Should we look at a new construction model home under construction that a builder pulled a permit with before January 24 th or should we look at building new from the ground up and build it today? I would caution the logic of trying to save $8,000 on a brand new home to get a model that is essentially a year outdated. Would you assume that each year a new car sells for more money due to the advances and amenities it offers? The difference is that new cars often go up by 5-8% per year. Under the new code changes, a new home that was $400,000 will now be closer to $410,000. This equates to about a 2.5% rise in costs. You must be conscience of the future when you need to sell your home and what the buyers might expect out of a home the same age as yours. If you don’t offer the same things, they might ask you to upgrade them in order to sell. We saw this first hand when the radon codes went into effect years ago. Now people are forced on almost every home to have that up to a certain criteria in order to sell. It would have been much less costly to do this up front. The moral of the story here is to just make sure you think things through in regards to saving a few thousand dollars when making a purchase of this magnitude. A few thousand today might save you more than that down the road! My personal choice would be to pay the extra money and get a home that has everything a future homeowner might expect to see when I decide to sell down the road.
