Planning, designing, and building a home can be quite exciting as well as time-consuming and laborious; a dual occupancy home, even more so.
A simple initial decision tree might start out with you planning on how to transform your idea into a fully-built and beautiful dual occupancy home: do it with a developer, or do it as a self-build?
It’s possible to do all of the work yourself, but is it worth it? Paying a developer to do it instead will cost more, but is it worth the cost?
Home Developers vs Self Builds for Dual Occupancy Homes
Building a home yourself is more or less what you imagine it is: it’s you planning, designing, and building the home with your bare hands from the ground up. In reality, many owner builders do only some or most tasks, not everything – and some they simply cannot do legally such as plumbing and electrical work which requires licensed professionals.
This means that an owner builder may contract out select tasks such as pouring concrete foundation slab, roofers, framers, and so on.
Conversely, a home developer takes on the responsibility of planning, designing, and building the home on your behalf and with consultations with you to ensure that you are satisfied with the design. They will manage the project and hire subcontractors as necessary, so it’s a turnkey solution.
The Pros of Going Through a Developer
A dual occupancy home developer looks after everything from initial planning consultations with you to handing over the keys and all relevant documents, ensuring a smooth transition to your brand new home.
Behind the scenes, however, there are several important advantages – especially for dual occupancy home development. These include navigating the complexities of legal subdivision, obtaining planning permissions and approvals, working with trusted subcontractors, and efficiently managing the project to be reasonably within budget and schedule.
The Cons of Going Through a Developer
There are so many advantages to a developer for a dual occupancy home, but are there any disadvantages? For starters, there is obviously a cost for their services, and that cost will typically be marginally higher than if you fully self built your home, but with an important caveat – cost and schedule overruns can be common for self builds if you lack experience and make one or more big mistakes.
Furthermore, working with a developer may limit your design and finish options, and there may be less flexibility in the final design. You’ll have to work with a well-established developer that offers designs that are to your liking.
The Pros of a Self-Managed Build
DIY home building is not something we do every day; actually, most of us never even bother, but those that do can find it quite exciting!
In a fully self built home, the sky’s the limit in terms of design possibilities. If you manage the build well, you can save about $30,000-$60,000 or even well over $100,000 in total costs, but that is certainly not guaranteed.
The Cons of a Self-Managed Build
Owner builders have several challenges to overcome, some of which may be quite daunting and/or costly. Building a dual occupancy home yourself is a huge time commitment, you need all planning permissions and approvals and need to negotiate with council yourself, retain an inspector yourself, coordinate any subcontractors, deal with any issues as they arise, and more.
Is it worth it? For some people, it absolutely is. For many others, it simply makes sense to work with a dual occupancy home developer instead.
Trevor Homes
Build your ideal dual occupancy home with Trevor Homes.
