How people actually shortlist a builder

A couple who'd just signed with a builder told me they'd kept a spreadsheet. Nine builders across the top, and rows for things like "does he do sloping blocks", "how long did the last one take", "did anyone mention variations". They'd started with about twenty names and it took them four months.

I asked what got people cut. It was almost never the work. It was that they couldn't tell, from the website, whether a builder did the sort of job they were doing, and after two visits they stopped trying.

That's the thing about building work that makes it unlike every other trade we write about here. Nobody is in a hurry. The site gets opened repeatedly across months, by more than one person, and at least one of them is looking for a reason to narrow the list down.

The gallery is the least useful page you own

Every builder site has forty photos of finished houses. So does every other builder site, and after a dozen tabs they blur into one long kitchen.

A photo tells someone what a finished house looks like. It tells them nothing about what it was like to deal with you, which is the actual question. What works better is one build, written up properly: the block it was on, the thing that made it difficult, what the council did and how long that part took, what changed halfway through and how that was handled.

Three of those beat forty photos, and they're the pages that get read twice. The first read is curiosity. The second read, usually a fortnight later with the partner, is the one that puts you on the short list.

Nobody wants to write these. They take an hour each and they feel like admitting things. That's roughly why they work.

Write the process page nobody writes

There's a stretch between "we like these people" and "there's a slab" that clients find genuinely frightening, and almost no builder's website says a word about it.

What happens after the first meeting. Whether they're getting a fixed-price contract or something else, and what that means in practice. DA or complying development, and who lodges it. What a provisional sum is, and what an allowance is, and why the tile allowance in the contract is the thing everybody argues about later. How variations get priced and approved before the work happens rather than appearing on an invoice. Roughly what the payment schedule looks like as a shape, without you quoting a number for anything.

Write it once, plainly, and you've answered the fear that sits underneath every one of those spreadsheet rows. It reads as someone who has done this before and isn't hiding the awkward parts.

The NSW government's own material on building or renovating a home is worth reading before you write yours, not to copy but because it tells you what your client will have already read and half-understood.

Paperwork, said plainly

Builders undersell this constantly.

Your licence number, on the page, where it can be checked. Whether you carry home warranty cover for the job, which in NSW runs through the Home Building Compensation Fund and has a state equivalent everywhere else. Public liability. Membership of a builders' association if you have one, though I'd rank that well below the first two, because clients check licences and mostly don't check memberships.

Two lines. It removes a real objection and it costs you nothing, and I still open builder sites every month that don't have a licence number anywhere on them.

Be clear about what you don't do

This is the one that got people cut from the spreadsheet, and it's counterintuitive enough that I'll spell it out.

Saying "we build custom homes across Sydney" is worse than useless, because it excludes nobody and reassures nobody. Say the size of job you take. Say whether you do knockdown rebuilds, or renovations, or both, and whether both really means "we'll do a renovation if it's a big one". Say where you actually build, which is usually a much smaller area than the state you've written on the page. Say if you don't do project homes.

You lose the enquiries you were never going to win, which cost you time anyway, and you win the ones where somebody read that and thought, that's us.

Your site is forty photos, so it's slow

Builder websites are consistently the slowest sites we open. It's not mysterious. It's a home page carrying twenty full-width images at whatever size the photographer delivered them, plus a video header, on a phone, on suburban 4G, while someone is standing on a block of land.

That's fixable in an afternoon by someone who knows what they're doing, and it's worth doing before anything else on this list, because none of the pages above matter if the person closes the tab first. We went into what slow actually costs separately, and the numbers are worse than most people expect.

The next enquiry

Take the last job you finished that you'd happily do again, and write it up. Not a caption. A page. The block, the problem, the decision you made, how long it took.

If it takes you an hour and reads like you talking, it'll do more than the next twenty photos will. The same instinct applies to the trades further down the chain, though the reader is completely different and in more of a rush, which we covered in what actually gets you the call.

And if you want an outside read on which parts of your current site are earning anything, we'll look through it for free and tell you where people are dropping out. Usually it's the same two places, and one of them is the contact form.