Because the same trades cannot be in two places at once. A builder with too many jobs on hands you around from person to person, and the finish and the timeline slip. How many homes your builder runs at the same time is one of the strongest predictors of the experience you are about to have, and almost nobody thinks to ask about it.
Here is what actually happens inside an overloaded building company. The owner who won your business gets stretched across too many sites, so a supervisor takes over. The supervisor has a dozen jobs, so your questions wait. The regular carpenters are tied up on another site, so a crew nobody has worked with before is brought in to keep your job moving. Each of those steps sounds small. Together, they are the difference between a build you enjoy and a build you endure. Quality does not usually fail in one dramatic moment. It leaks away through handovers, substitutions and delays that each seemed reasonable at the time.
We build up to ten homes a year and space them around four to six weeks apart. That spacing is deliberate. It means the same carpenters and trades work on every home we build, one after another, rather than being scattered across simultaneous sites. Trades who work together constantly know each other’s standards. The plumber knows how our carpenter frames. The tiler knows what our waterproofer expects. That familiarity shows up in your finish, in the corners that line up and the details nobody had to redo.
It also means you deal with Toby and the same team the whole way through. Not a rotating cast, not a call centre, not whoever is rostered on. The person who walked your block, sat through your selections and set out your full size walkthrough is the same person answering your questions during the build. Toby has kept the business this size on purpose for about 15 years. The word he uses is manageable. He could take on more homes tomorrow. He chooses not to, because every builder has a number beyond which they are no longer really building, they are just administrating, and he has watched what happens to quality on the other side of that line.
There is one more thing worth understanding about how a capped builder operates, and it works in your favour. Our construction slots are earned, not handed out. You get your slot when you finish the preliminary stage and sign your contract. If you are slow to sign and someone behind you is ready to go, they may get the slot first. That is not us chasing you or pressuring you. It is the opposite. It is making sure the clients who are ready and committed are looked after, rather than sitting in a queue behind someone who cannot make a decision. It keeps everyone honest, including us.
So when you are comparing builders, add this question to your list: how many homes do you have under construction right now, and who exactly will I be dealing with day to day? Then listen carefully to the answer. A builder who says “as many as we can win” is telling you where you will sit on their priority list. A builder who can name their cap, explain why it exists and tell you precisely who your contact will be has thought hard about protecting the thing you are actually paying for, which is a home built properly by people who were paying attention.
If you want to know where our next available slots sit, call Toby on 0483 943 309. He will tell you straight, including if the honest answer is that you would be waiting a while. That is the trade off of a capped builder, and most of our clients decided it was exactly the trade off they wanted.
Link back to the epic post: What “Fixed Price” Really Means in a Building Contract.
