The Five Reasons Why You Should Not Hire a General Contractor

Hi there .

My name is Keith Kels .

Welcome to how to build your own home .

I want to talk about the five reasons why you should not hire a general contractor .

Believe me , this is not easy for me to say because I am a general contractor .

I've been building for about 25 years .

I'm also an educator .

I've been a teacher for about the same number of years .

And so a lot of people will be giving me a phone call and they want advice on how to build their own home .

So I'm going to give it all out .

I'm going to tell everything that I know about contracting and building your own home .

This is not a diy project .

This is basically how to manage the construction of your own home .

Here are the five reasons why you should build your own home .

Number one , you've got time , one of the reasons why we hire people like myself is to save time , they don't have the time to do it .

We come in there and we manage that for you if you've got the time to do it and I'll explain the time involved some weeks it's really hell raising and other weeks , it's not that not that bad , but if you've got the time , that's the number one reason why you should not hire a general contract .

The second reason why you should not hire a general contractor is that you want to add more value to the home .

It could be a better roofing system , a better insulation system , better flooring system , more upgrades in your appliances .

It could be a number of things .

Being able to save a lot of money on your home by managing yourself allows you that opportunity .

I know from personal experience having built a lot of homes , the budget was so tight that they didn't have any room to really add value in the areas that I thought or even the homeowners wanted to add .

So that's an incredible reason why you should not hire a general contractor .

The third reason why you shouldn't hire a general contractor is that you want to put more savings in your pocket .

That's a big big one .

If you can imagine saving 20 to 30 to $40,000 on the actual cost of your home , that's like equity in your pocket .

That's value that sticks with you forever and it cuts down on your mortgage over a 30 year or 15 year period of time .

So putting that savings back in your pocket , that's big .

The fourth reason why you should not hire a general contractor has to do a change orders and mark ups .

If you want more control of change orders and mark ups during the course of construction , you need to be your own general contractor .

Now , what are those things ?

A change order is something that you change and if you foresee that you want to change a lot or sense that you're gonna change things during the course of construction , a regular general contractor is going to charge you a fee for that based upon the contract that you signed with them .

The other thing is mark ups , you don't know based upon that contract with that contractor , if he or she is making up any markups on the back end of things .

So if you want control over the cost of change orders and control over potential markups and costs , you want to be your own general contractor .

The fifth reason why you should not hire a general contractor is you simply can't afford them .

One of the biggest costs in building a home when hiring a general contractor is their fee , their fee can be anywhere from 7 to 23% and has a huge range based upon the contract that you sign with the general contractor .

Now , if you can afford a home that's around 275,000 , maybe 300,000 .

Can you afford a home ?

That's another $30,000 .

If you can't , you know what you need to do , you need to build your own home .

You need to manage the construction of that home to bring it down within the price range that you can afford .

I hope these five principles help you out .

Please subscribe to the channel .

Follow me , see me at how to build your own home dot com .

I have an owner builder training program that walks you through everything you need to know to be your own general contractor .