After, visiting Metricon yesterday I was not sure whether the $12,000 discount I was offered was a good deal or whether it was just to try to pressure me into putting a deposit down. I was also wondering why Metricon would be able to cut into their margin by $12,000. Either their prices are inflated to allow them to give discounts or they are sourcing their materials cheap.
I had been turning the $12,000 over in my head all day, as I didn’t have long to secure the price I had been offered at Metricon, if it was a really good deal I didn’t want to miss out. I had heard the GJ Gardner ad on the radio when I woke up, then again when I got in the car to go to work and when I got in the car to come home from work the ad was on the radio again. So on the spot I decided to drive past the GJ Gardner office in town and see if anyone was there.
I had previously been into the GJ Gardner office when I was first looking at buying land and building to get a rough idea of prices for building a house about the size I was after. I went in and the salesman I had briefly spoken to one lunchtime a few months ago immediately recognised who I was and that I would have to pay off my car before I built a house on the block of land I was looking at.
We sat down and started looking at the plan I was interested in (Discovery 147). The plan did not have a walk-in-robe in the master bedroom. I asked about modifying it to include a walk-in-robe. The salesman said “no worries” and pulled out his whiteout and started modifying the plan to include a walk-in-robe. We added eaves to the garage, carpet and tiles to areas that were not covered by default, swapped the three small windows in the master bedroom for one large one and made a few other minor changes. We also made allowances for a concrete driveway and crossover.
The estimate that he was able to give me was pretty close to the price Metricon had given me after a $12,000 discount. The GJ Gardner quote included everything the Metricon quote did and much more. GJ Gardner do a lot of things as standard that are upgrades with other builders. The salesman was not able to give me a firm quote on the spot because of the modification of the Master Bedroom. However, he said that it should not be much more as we had deleted the standard robe. He said the quote should be back from the estimator later this week or early next week.
I felt much better after meeting with GJ Gardner and have basically decided that I will not be building with Metricon as their base prices seem a little expensive and their plans don’t quite suit what I am looking for.