Every builder in the region advertises a price and every one of those prices is incomplete. That is not dishonesty — it is that the largest variable in your final number has nothing to do with the house and everything to do with the piece of ground it sits on.
This page sets out what actually makes up the price, in the order the numbers become known. It will not give you a figure for your build, because nobody can do that from a web page.
The four numbers that make up your price
- 01The home. The build cost of the design itself, to our standard specification. This is the number that appears in advertising, and it is the only one a builder can state before seeing your land.
- 02The site. What it takes to put that home on that specific block: excavation and site cut, the slab design your soil classification requires, retaining and drainage if the land falls, and rock removal if there is any. On two blocks in the same street this can differ substantially.
- 03The connections. Water, sewer, power and gas from the boundary to the house. A formality on an estate lot; a significant number on acreage, where the distances are real.
- 04Everything outside the house. Fencing, landscaping, driveway beyond the standard, window furnishings, letterbox and clothesline. Quoted separately unless you have asked for a turnkey specification — and collectively they are not small.
Why nobody can quote you properly on day one
Three things have to happen before number two above can be known: a survey establishing the levels and boundaries, a soil test establishing the classification, and a title search confirming the easements, covenants and overlays.
Until those are done, any site cost figure is an allowance rather than a price. Allowances are useful for early budgeting and dangerous if you mistake them for a quote — which is exactly what happens when a builder presents one without saying which it is. We tell you which it is.
What moves the number most, in order
Ranked rather than listed, because the ranking is the useful part.
Slope is usually first, because retaining and drainage scale faster than the fall does. See sloping block builds.
Soil classification is second. Reactive clay needs a more substantial slab than stable ground, and the border region has plenty of both.
Distance to services is third, and on rural land it can overtake the first two entirely.
Facade and finish selections are fourth — genuinely a matter of choice, and the one lever you fully control.
Design changes are fifth, and their cost depends enormously on which changes. Moving a wall is cheap; moving a bathroom is not. See custom homes and design changes.
When the price stops moving
At the fixed-price contract, which we do not put in front of you until the site assessment is complete. From that point the contract price is the contract price.
What can still change afterwards is what you change — a variation you request during construction is a variation, and it is priced and agreed before it happens. What will not change is our costs finding their way onto your invoice.
The costs that are not ours
Worth naming so that nothing arrives as a surprise: council and permit fees, service connection fees charged by the utility providers, construction insurance, your own conveyancing and lending costs, and in some estates a developer bond or landscaping compliance requirement. None of these are builder margin and all of them are real.
Getting a real number for your situation
Send us a block address, or tell us the suburb you are looking in. We will tell you which designs fit, what the likely site factors are, and what we would need in order to give you a fixed price. That first conversation costs nothing and it is considerably more useful than any figure we could publish here.
