Pros & Cons of Building a New Construction Home

Why did we choose new construction vs. purchasing a resale home?

I had several criteria for buying our next home:

1.  The new home had to be large enough for our family of 5 to grow into.

2.  It had to have a bedroom and full bath downstairs for when our parents come to visit.

3.  We had to stay in the same school district.

4.  With the budget that I had, everything had to be accounted for - ie - if the resale home needed a new kitchen or landscaping work needed to be done

I've had my eye on the real estate market for the last year and nothing ever came up in the resale market that matched my all of my criteria.  One home may have had a gorgeous kitchen but then I would have wanted to rip out all the bathrooms.  I factored the cost of say bathroom remodels and new flooring and the amount of time it would take to redo everything and I realized that a resale home may not be for my next home.

PROS:

The resale homes in our area of comparable size were believe it or not - higher priced than new construction.

New construction also allowed us the flexibility of choosing the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, whether we wanted a regular sliding door or an 18 foot floor to ceiling accordion door, choosing flooring that fit our needs, brushed nickel bath accessories and door handles, the entire kitchen customized to our liking, and many more details that I'll go into in another blog post.  We LOVE the open concept floor plan and were able to choose the floorplan that best suited our needs!  We also don't have to pay for upgrades that we will never use - such as a surround sound system.  

KB Home also offers a full one year warranty on everything and then a 10 year limited warranty - less money to shell out for maintenance = happy me!

Everything is built to be energy efficient so that means lower utility bills.

So, I waited patiently for a builder to start building in our area.  KB Home was the only builder to fit all of our criteria.  

CONS: 

It's been mostly smooth sailing with the building process - the only downside I feel and we still haven't even broken ground yet even though we signed our contract back in early November is that our timeline could have been better managed.  We were told in the beginning of a March/April move in and now we're looking at June/July.  It makes it hard to sell our current home because we need to rent back until we move into our new home.  Temporary housing is not in the cards because it is just too hard to move twice in 3 months with 3 special needs kiddos.

We may be looking at piles of dirt outside our windows for a while as they build up the next phase of homes after we move in - but the boys will think that is great fun. 

There is no negotiating on the price of the home as we are in a highly desired market.

Every upgrade and customization costs money and trust me when I tell you that it adds up really fast!  If you want to replicate what the model home looks like, be prepared to shell out some serious cash.  I suffered from sticker shock at first....but when Phil did the math for me, every $10,000 in upgrades would only cost me $50/month in additional mortgage payments - this is calculated at the interest rate for our loan.