Building a home is often the single largest investment you will ever make. In choosing a building partner you need to be satisfied about the quality of the builder, how costs are managed to avoid overruns and whether the building company has a good track record of completing projects on time.

These FAQs are designed to help answer some of those questions.

Our builders are all Licensed Building Practitioners. This means that the work is carried out by builders recognised as meeting industry approved skills and knowledge.

A Master Build 10-Year Guarantee covers you even before building work starts, while building is underway and for a period of 10 years from when the building program has come to an end. This guarantee can also be transferred to a new owner in the event that you sell your home. Because we have confidence in the quality of our building works we also provide a 15-year weathertightness guarantee.

Our team also understand that a large part of our work is based on repeat business and referrals, so it is important to us that our clients are happy with the work that we do.

This will depend on the style of home you are wanting to build, the materials you want to use and the site that you are building on. Once we have visited your site we can use our experience to give you an estimate of costs based on your design and specification. As we continue to work with you through the design process, we can finalise pricing once we better understand how you want your new home to look.

Brant builds a large number of homes each year and has preferred-supplier rates for a range of products and services which means we can offer you extremely competitive rates.  A price per square metre is not a reliable way to price a home and typically results in surprises for either the builder or the customer. Brant prices each individual component in a home from the ‘bottom up’ to create a very accurate fixed price. We also use our pricing methodology to value PC sums to avoid nasty surprises.

In our letter of engagement, we outline the key milestones for the building project, so clients know what happens and when. We also provide weekly updates, so you know what has happened that week and what is going to happen the following week.

Our priority is to ensure the build happens as quickly as possible, so our experienced team works to ensure that the right people are doing the right thing at the right time. We typically take between six and eight months from when the floor is started through to when the front door key is handed over to the client.

We project manage the entire project on your behalf. This includes lodging the plan with Council, managing plan queries and liaising with the architect or designer.

In addition to a building consent, a resource consent may be required – this depends on what you are building (permitted use) and how you are building on the site (for example, extensive excavation work may require a resource consent).

The site works required depend on the design of the home; however, most sites will require some form of levelling and clearing. A flat site may require minimal excavation work. A sloping site may require more excavation work and the building of retaining walls.

In addition, a geotechnical report may be required depending on the soil type to test stability and compaction.  This may identify whether additional foundation work is required.

If you are intending to build close to boundaries, potentially impact on the height-to-boundary limits for the neighbouring property, or if the site is sloping, we will need to sight survey pegs or have a survey done to identify the boundaries.

We understand that sometimes your requirements change, and we are happy to accommodate variations.  This may or may not result in a change to the building price. In any event, all variations (including price changes) are agreed with you in writing.

While we provide a complete design and build solution, we are also happy to work with your own architect or architectural designer to build your home.

We are a kiwi-owned Auckland-based building company and have been building quality homes across the region for many years. While we never set out to be the biggest building company, we always wanted to be the best. We have a close-knit team of over 50 master tradespeople who believe in what they do and are committed to bringing your home to life.

We understand that for some clients, building a home is a big project; however, we believe we are good listeners and very experienced at guiding and supporting you through this journey. We are also very experienced at pricing and project managing the house build, as well as using only high-quality products and building processes to ensure you get the very best value for money.

Also, we love what we do…