GOLDEN HOMES

Green light your build

ABODE’S HOME BUILD EXPERT, DEAN MCGUIGAN, FROM GOLDEN HOMES, EXPLAINS WHY BUILDING A HOME IS A SOUND OPTION IN A HEATED HOUSING MARKET.

The property market is running red hot! More and more buyers are considering building to mitigate the uncertainty of buying an existing home.

With the build journey being around nine months, it is critical to align yourself with the right team to help you travel down this path to your dream home. Surrounding yourself with trusted experts, such as mortgage brokers, banks, lawyers, builders and designers, is of paramount importance. They need to have integrity, and you need to have trust in them for peace of mind. Identify who you want to have on your team, consider the steps of their involvement and ask questions along the way.

I have an excellent analogy for the build process with all the steps and the decisions you need to make along the way. This is important, as it highlights the fact that not all things need to be decided from the start. Some decisions need to be made early, like where you want to live, others come later, like considering the

DEAN MCGUIGAN Director, Canterbury Region at Golden Homes

colour of your benchtop. All decisions need to be made, just not all at once.

Consider Bealey Avenue in Christchurch and picture driving from one end to the other. Bealey Ave has lots of traffic lights. Imagine these lights are the decisions you need to make during the process. When you’re ready to drive at one end of Bealey Ave, you don’t wait until all of the lights are green before you take off. If this were the case, you’d never get started. Instead, you start with one green light, that’s one decision. Move to the next set of lights, wait for the green, make that decision, then continue. You will make it to the end, encountering stop lights or decisions, before navigating to the next. Whatever you do, don’t run a red light.

Having the right team around you will help turn these red lights into green. Each will play their part, just be sure to choose the right team members, ones that share your values.