How to Work With a Builder: Why Good Clients Get the Best Prices

This article is adapted from Chapter 11 of Your Seven Step Home Extension Plan by Ashton Paul — the book that shows homeowners how to manage a project and avoid the stresses and strains of the home extension process.

Be honest — have you ever given any thought to becoming a good customer? Every post in this series so far has been about judging builders. This one turns the telescope around, because your builder is weighing you up too, from his own experience, like a credit rating: is this client going to be hard work, or a delight?

And it matters commercially. If all the good builders are busy — and the good ones usually are — the good client gets the best price, because there's a fair chance the job will be straightforward and even enjoyable. The difficult client finds the shop politely shut: "I'm so sorry, I've just taken on another project — I won't have a slot for 12 to 14 weeks." Or the price arrives inflated just enough to deter further enquiries — and if it doesn't deter them, at least the margin makes the pain worthwhile. It's human nature to be fairer to nice people.

So here is the book's guide to being the client good builders compete for.

Know what you want — the shoe shop test

Paul's first job, remembered lovingly, was as a sales assistant at a shoe shop on Oxford Street — and his favourite customers knew exactly what they wanted. In, browse, "have you got these in a size 6?", boxes out (plus the half-size either side, just in case), sold, cashier. Everyone wins.

Now scale it up. If you'd research a £425 pair of shoes online before buying — the style, the price, the alternatives — why wouldn't you do that research at one hundred times the cost for the £42,500 loft conversion or kitchen extension of the book's era? (Today the multiple is only bigger: extension build costs run £2,500–£3,500 per square metre and even the simplest loft conversions start around £60,000.) Builders work for themselves; they love clients who know what they want, because it speeds every decision. Any research at all beats relying 100% on your architect or builder — and it signals you're serious about the project, which changes how seriously you're treated.

The opposite behaviour has a name among builders: the fact-finding mission. A builder works five days a week on site, does his hated paperwork in the evenings, and visits prospective clients at weekends — to hear "thanks for your time, I'm seeing two more builders." Getting three prices is right and proper for a tender on a defined specification; using three builders as a free research service, then picking the lowest number, is both unfair and self-defeating — because as we've said before, the lowest price is usually the price with the most missing. Do your due diligence with research and professional advice; use builders' time when you're ready to buy. (Who to call first covers this exact sequence.)

Be realistic about costs — and timescales

Client budgeting is a big issue for builders, because so many budgets arrive from nowhere. At the time of the book, clients were still insisting a loft conversion could be built for £20,000 against realistic south-east figures half as much again — numbers picked up from parties with every reason to understate: sellers, and builders using low start prices to trap customers. A starter price plucked from thin air only ever travels one way: up with the planning drawings, up again with the building control drawings, up again as the finishes are defined.

Timescales deserve the same realism. Design, approvals, specification and pricing take several months before a start, and rushing the process causes more problems than the delay you were avoiding. When you bought your house, did the conveyancing take longer than you wanted? Of course it did — because some things are too important to be rushed by client pressure, and your house, likely worth somewhere between £300,000 and £750,000 in the south-east, is the biggest of them.

The grand finale of unrealism is what the book calls the grand designer: the client who refuses to accept that a complete refurbishment plus kitchen extension, utility, cloakroom and loft conversion cannot be done for £185,000 — because their wishful-thinking budget has no contingency, skinny professional fees, and no VAT. Priced realistically, the same scope came to £242,220. One such client spent over a year talking to seven builders and two architects, searching for the magical introduction to someone who'd do it for the fantasy number. That's not shopping around; that's a recipe for disaster. Not allowing for VAT in your budget, as the book puts it, is like making Yorkshire puddings without eggs.

The client deliverables

We pin builders down with contracts, programmes and deliverables — quite rightly. But where are our deliverables? The book's scene: Monday morning, 8 a.m., scaffold up, skip booked for ten. The builder knocks quietly, ready to start a great project — and the client says, "Well, we've only managed to clear out half the loft. Could you help us clear it, and put some rubbish in the skip since you have one anyway?" The builder says "no problem" — and thinks: there goes my first hour, and half my skip.

So here they are — Ashton Paul's client deliverables, exactly four items long:

1. Provide a good tea station and/or dry space. Cups, milk and coffee not required — a good builder sorts his own supplies.
2. Clear the working area before the start — or agree for the builder to clear it and offer to pay him. (Honestly, a removal firm will do it cheaper.)
3. Provide access to a downstairs toilet if you have one — accept it will take a beating, have it cleaned at completion, and save yourself the cost of a Portaloo.
4. Pay on time. Every time, by the agreed method. If your builder's world runs on weekly wages, understand that cash means cash — his subcontractors get paid Friday whatever your banking arrangements say. "I can only transfer £10,000 at a time between accounts" is not the builder's problem, and forcing him to cashflow your project sours everything it touches.

Deliver those four and — per the management post — you're most of the way to being the customer builders tell other builders about, in the good way.

Don't change your mind (much), and don't get in the way

If you knew the real cost of changing your mind mid-works, you'd spend the extra week up front locking the design down — which is, of course, exactly what the book has been recommending since chapter one. The tidy example: a double-panel radiator costs £200 supplied and fitted. Ask for it moved after installation and you're looking at £500 — one decision, a 150% cost increase — because the plumber stops his planned day, strips out and re-runs pipework (trades hate redoing their work), fetches a different radiator, and makes good the wall and floor behind the old one. This, scaled across a project, is why the book says flatly: all projects go over budget. Some early changes are fine. Too many are expensive.

Similar logic applies to simply being around too much. In the book's worked example, a builder carries out roughly £5,000 of work a week — £20,000 a month — when he's left to work, and its illustrative 26-week programme carries perhaps four weeks of contingency you can't see. A client who's constantly underfoot, renegotiating and hovering, burns that contingency with nothing to show for it. Let them work.

And a matched pair of honesty rules. Don't plead extreme poverty at the start, then refuse to compromise on premium bathroom fittings and underfloor heating — your builder will conclude, correctly, that you were less than honest, and trades remember who squeezed them. Better to be realistic about costs and hold a contingency you genuinely intend not to spend. Equally: when you have a good builder, know it. Paul has watched good builders nearly broken by relentless clients applying rules from their own careers — withholding payments, inventing penalties. Be firm, be fair, and don't go for the jugular just because you can.

The thank-you that actually means something

Cups of tea are nice. But the icing on the cake for any builder is the referral that leads to another job in the same road. In the good old days, a builder could do three or four projects in one road on recommendation alone. "We were so happy with the works, we recommended you to number 24" is, in the book's word, the jackpot.

Consider what you're saving him: competitive tendering costs a builder an estimated £1,000–£5,000 per job to price and win; he'll typically price three jobs to secure one; and he'll spend an estimated 30–40 hours in client meetings and estimating. A referral wipes all of that out. It's the win-win that ends a good project properly: he did great work and managed your expectations; you delivered your side and then did him the best possible good turn. Actions speak louder than tea.

The good client checklist

From the end of Chapter 11:

• Deliver on your promises
• Be professionally nice
• Don't rely on builders to develop your scope
• Understand what you're getting into — and what things cost
• Don't waste builders' time
• Try not to change your mind — it's expensive
• Don't become an obstacle
• Pay your builder on time
• Provide a referral on successful completion

Being a good client is step zero of every successful project — and it's far easier when the design, specification and contract have been handled professionally, which is precisely what our surveyor-led design and build service does. The full guide, including everything your builder wishes you knew, is in Your Seven Step Home Extension Plan (£12.99).