When a client brings us a block, we look at three things first: the shape, the slope and whether it is a corner block. Those three tell us most of what we need to know about how easy or expensive the block will be to build on, and you can start assessing them yourself before you ever call a builder.
Shape first. A regular square or rectangle is ideal, because it gives the design room to move. The house can sit where it works best for sun, privacy and access. A block that tapers to a point at the back, or carries an odd angle through it, limits where the house can go and forces the design around the boundary rather than around your life. Irregular blocks can still produce great homes, but they take more design work to get right, and that is worth knowing before you buy rather than after.
Slope is where the money hides. A sloping block adds cost in ways you cannot see standing on the footpath. Retaining walls, extra foundations, engineering, and the big one, soil removal. If your block slopes and you want a flat home, that soil has to be dug out and trucked away, and it can run [$30,000 to $50,000]. In Toby’s words, soil removal is the biggest waste of money in the building game. You are paying for machines, trucks and tip fees, and every dollar of it adds absolutely nothing to your finished home. No better kitchen, no extra bedroom, nothing you will ever see. Council rules on floor heights can force you to remove even more soil than the slope alone suggests. And do not trust your eyes on this one. We do contour surveys on blocks the owners swore were flat and find a metre to a metre and a half of fall across them.
Corner blocks look like bargains and often are not. Estates frequently sell them cheaper, and buyers assume they have found value. But corner blocks come with tighter setbacks on two street frontages instead of one, and most councils and estates expect two good looking facades, not one. That second frontage costs real money in design and materials. Sometimes the cheaper corner block ends up the more expensive home.
Beyond the big three, two checks separate a good buy from a headache. The first is a soil test, where a machine digs test holes to see whether you are building on sand, clay or rock. That decides your foundations, and foundations priced from a guess are how budgets blow out. The second is the estate design guidelines, which around Camden and Macarthur are now often stricter than council. They can dictate your colours, your style, even your minimum size, and you usually need the developer’s approval before council sees anything. A block inside a restrictive estate can quietly rule out the home you were picturing.
Here is the pattern behind every one of these traps: they are all invisible on inspection day and all expensive after settlement. Which leads to the single most valuable piece of advice on this page. Talk to a builder who knows the area before you buy the block, not after. We do this for clients regularly, and it costs you nothing but a phone call. We recently had to tell a client, after weeks of design work, that his Picton block’s heritage restrictions meant he would never get the home he wanted on it. He would have given a lot to know that before he bought.
If you are weighing up a block anywhere across Macarthur, Camden, the Illawarra or the Southern Highlands, call Toby on 0483 943 309 before you sign the land contract. Ten minutes on the phone can save you the most expensive mistake in the entire building process, which is putting the right home on the wrong land.
Link back to the epic post: What “Fixed Price” Really Means in a Building Contract.
