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Building a house, as opposed to buying an existing one, certainly gives you the luxury and satisfaction of owning real estate that is tailor-made to your specific tastes and needs. You also have almost unlimited freedom to choose home designs based on your aesthetics and budget.

Despite such obvious positives, many home investors almost instinctively recoil from the prospect of building a home from the ground up. Many love the idea, but it's the headache of execution, both real and imagined, that gets people a bit worried.

Fears, a few of which are justified, hold people back from construction. These include unpredictable cost escalations, estimation errors, and extended construction timelines. Above all, there is a need for more customer education about present-day construction-tracking systems that are capable of efficiently managing timelines, contractors, and budgets, with minimal surprises. This is probably the “peace of mind” offering home investors have been waiting for.

To put anxieties about home construction to rest, here are some tips to save money on construction without compromising on quality:

Invest in promising destinations

Buy your plot in an up-and-coming location where property prices will likely go up, years from now. Look for upcoming infrastructure projects such as an airport, metros, as well as commercial and residential properties, which throw some indications of upward mobility in real estate prices in the days ahead. Industrial policies announced by local governments from time to time and business-supportive attitude of municipal corporations are also signs to watch out for. Give a wide berth to low-lying land unless you have no other choice. These might require several layers of earth filling with reduced void space between soil particles. A road-level plot will simply save you all that trouble.

Standard designs work just as well

A house design, which resonates with your aspirations is the best you can ask for. That said, a resourceful architect always has a portfolio of home designs at hand that have worked to their clients' satisfaction in the past. Most importantly, such home designs will help you to not only cut back costs but also realise a layout that is still very close to your heart. In the final reckoning, residential builds based on such stock designs, tread the happy middle ground between personalised boutique homes and mass-produced apartment units.

Make a plan that you won’t deviate from

Think of your house plan as a perfectly planned movie script. Midway through shooting, a filmmaker wouldn’t want to make offhand changes to the screenplay unless he has sufficiently deep pockets. Likewise, changes to the home layout will result in cost escalations, especially if they come after the construction has kicked off. So, once the home design is ready, take time to mull over its micro-details. Make sure you are actually satisfied with the plan, and try not to rush ahead with construction before that.

Use locally available building materials

Sourcing bricks, cement, and tiles from within a limited radius of the building site will help you save on transportation costs and, furthermore, bulk ordering means even more savings. Reusing materials like bricks, roofing, doors, window frames, metal fittings, and steel sections is another money-saving hack, and there are specialists that can get you these materials at reasonable prices.

No home is entirely maintenance-free, but some demand lower maintenance costs over their lifetime, than others. Putting your hard-earned money into low-maintenance materials (e.g., clay bricks, ferrocement, concrete, fly ash bricks, ceramic tiles and fixtures) will certainly ensure your home goes the distance for you. Some of these building blocks might carry a higher price tag, but their long-term benefits justify the premium price and labour cost.

At JSW One Homes, our professionals use trendy technology to create realistic renderings of your to-be home, and undertake to deliver it at a mutually agreed price. What you see on-screen is what you will get. JSW One Homes will be more than happy to assist you in building a home that is all custom down to the last switchboard and door knob. Alternatively, you can pick your choice from our design inspirations, and our highly qualified architects, designers, and contractors will be more than happy to assist you in turning your vision into reality, that too all within your budget. Our playbook is simple: Take the uncertainties of building a house out of the equation.