The short answer: the right questions to ask a custom home builder before signing fall into five categories — contract certainty (how fixed is the fixed-price?), team continuity (who's actually on your build?), workload (how many projects do they run at once?), credentials (licence, insurance, warranty), and references (recent comparable builds, not just the showcase). The builders who give straight answers to all five are the ones worth shortlisting.
A custom home is a 12–24 month relationship with someone you'll trust with significant money. The conversation at quote stage is where you find out whether they're going to be the right partner — or whether you'll be re-reading the contract clauses three months in trying to work out what was actually agreed.
Here's the list we'd bring to a quote meeting if we were on the homeowner side.
Category 1 — How "fixed" is the fixed price?
This is the single most important question. Two builders can quote the same number with completely different levels of risk attached.
- How many Provisional Sum (PS) items are in the contract, and what's each one for? A genuine fixed-price has very few. PS for "site costs" or "drainage" is a soft figure that moves once construction starts.
- How many Prime Cost (PC) items, and have I selected each one? Tapware, tiles, appliances. If they're PC and unselected, you'll be writing variations once site starts.
- Has the site been classified to AS 2870 (M, H1, H2) before contract? Without a soil report the slab cost in the contract is a guess.
- What's your variation rate per project on recent builds? Real number, not "we don't do many."
- What happens to the price if construction costs rise? Genuine fixed-price means the builder absorbs it. Read the escalation clause carefully.
Category 2 — Who's actually on my build?
The salesperson who wins your contract is rarely the person you'll be talking to during construction. Get specific.
- Who is my single point of contact through the build?
- Is that person the same one I'll be speaking to at handover?
- How many active sites does my project manager and site supervisor currently have? This single answer tells you whether you'll get attention. One supervisor running 15 sites can't.
- Who handles design, and who handles construction — are they on the same team or handed off?
- What's the company's owner's involvement on individual builds? Some founders are still on tools or in design review. Others are entirely removed.
Category 3 — Workload and capacity
This question filters out builders who'll be overcommitted by the time you start.
- How many homes do you build per year?
- What's your typical lead time from contract to construction start?
- What's your variation processing time when something needs to change mid-build?
- Do you cap your annual intake? Boutique builders explicitly do. Volume builders explicitly don't. Both honest, both useful information.
Category 4 — Credentials and protection
This is the floor. Anyone refusing to answer plainly is a problem.
- NSW Fair Trading builder licence number? Look it up online — confirms the licence is current and there are no recent rectification orders.
- Home Building Compensation (HBC) Fund / iCare cover number? Statutory minimum is six years' structural protection.
- What warranty does the business offer above the statutory minimum? Anything beyond 6 years is the builder backing their own work. Macan offers 7-year structural.
- What's your insurance — Public Liability, Construction All Risk, Workers Comp? Confirm they're current.
- Master Builders / HIA membership? Not a guarantee of quality but a useful signal of accountability.
- Any pending disputes, NCAT cases, or recent rectification orders? Direct question, watch the response.
Category 5 — Real references, not staged ones
The showcase project gets toured. The real story is in the projects that didn't go on the website.
- Can I tour a finished build that's lived-in (not a display home)? Real conditions, real owner present.
- Can I speak with two clients whose builds finished in the last 12 months — not the trophy projects?
- Can I see a build currently mid-construction? This tells you whether sites are tidy, organised, and resourced.
- What was the most challenging build of the last 12 months and how was it resolved? A confident builder talks honestly about hard projects.
- Have you built in my suburb / on a similar block / with a similar brief? Specific experience matters more than generic experience.
Bonus — the questions that filter slow
These get you straight to whether the builder is selling or advising.
- "What about my project might make you say no?" A builder who has criteria for the projects they take is a serious one.
- "What's a recent project where the original plan changed significantly, and how did you handle it?"
- "Tell me about a time you had to deliver bad news to a client — what was it and how did the conversation go?"
A builder who's never had to deliver bad news either hasn't been in business long or isn't telling you about it.
Red flags to listen for
If you hear any of these in the conversation, take notes:
- "Don't worry about the contract — it's standard." (Read the contract.)
- "We rarely have variations." (Ask for the actual rate.)
- "We can probably start next month." (Boutique builders don't have idle capacity. Volume builders sometimes do for the wrong reasons.)
- "The 7-year warranty is just for marketing." (Then why offer it?)
- "Nobody's ever complained about us." (Everyone has unhappy customers eventually — what matters is how they were handled.)
- "Trust us, we'll figure it out as we go." (Custom homes don't reward this approach.)
How we answer these questions ourselves
We've put most of our answers on this site already:
- Why we cap how many homes we build each year — the project intake question
- Fixed-price vs cost-plus contracts: what NSW homeowners need to know — the contract certainty question
- The Macan 7-step process — what the build sequence and contact points look like
- About Macan Group — the founder, the values, the workload model
If you've got a quote meeting coming up and want to talk through which of these questions are most worth pushing on for your specific situation, get in touch. Even if Macan isn't the right builder for your project, an hour of conversation about what to ask makes you a better client for whoever you do choose.
