Pre-Construction Process Explained.

Welcome to the Future of Construction podcast. I am your host, Kyle McLaughlin. And today, we're going to be talking about the process of building a home. Really any structure for that matter. But for the purpose of the video and For this podcast, we're going to focus on the house process. I'm going to give you, I guess, some ideas on how, if you're building a commercial structure or something that's not necessarily related to a home, how the process may change throughout the course of the timeline. This will be the first of a three-part series episode because obviously it's an intensive process and I want to make sure I'm thorough. I want to make sure I'm educated those of you that are not maybe too familiar with the process, and even some of you that are, but maybe are involved in different trades, you can understand the full life cycle from soup to nuts, basically, all the way from conceptual design to certificate of occupancy, and obviously handing the keys to your home or structure for that matter. Let's get right to it. Again, I'm your host, Kyle McLaughlin.

This is the Future of Construction podcast where we're going over the building process. We're starting episode one of three for this series. It's going to be focused on the preconstruction side of the process. Preconstruction is everything that happens before a shovel hits the ground. When you talk about, Okay, I've decided to build a home. You've decided to build a home. Congratulations. We're good to go. We're excited. We're going to build. We're going to design. It's going to be our dream home. Well, there's a couple of things that we want to be aware of before we really get too deep into the process. Number one is very obvious, but I'm going to go through it. Some of this may seem redundant, but I want it for the sake of illustrating points and circling back to certain aspects of what I'm talking about, I want to be thorough. Do we have land yet? Is this something... Have you already purchased a tract of land? Do you have land earmarked that maybe you're under contract on or you're doing some due diligence? You saw a piece of land on Zillow. It's in your favorite neighborhood. We need to understand the land and any limitations and any zoning requirements for the land.

Whether you already own it or you're looking to purchase it, it's always important to understand what your setbacks, your limitations, and your zoning is going to be for that that specific track of land. Most lots are pretty standard. You're going to have rear setbacks, front setbacks, and side setbacks. Depending on how big the lot is or where it's located within a certain municipality or jurisdiction, those are going to vary. It's important that whatever you do, your first action item with land should be to obtain a survey. Normally, that's what's called a boundary survey. A boundary survey will tell you exactly where your setbacks are going to be, what what land you actually own. From this end to this end, this amount of distance, front to back is my land that I own. This is my buildable land. This is what belongs to me when I purchase it, or if I already own it, this survey essentially tells me on a plot of land, what is actually mine versus what's the neighbor's or what belongs to the municipality. You start with your survey. Number two, and just as important, you're going to want to do some soil studies.

This may or may not be necessary depending on where you're purchasing your land or where you own your land. But let's just say you're in a rural area, right? And you're going to face certain challenges, such as down here in Florida, we have wetlands, which is swamp land. It's in the everyweights. So normally, we'd want to do an environmental assessment to see how much of the lot is wet versus dry. Literally, some of it will be swamp versus some of them being uplands is what we call it, which is dry land. So that determines where you can actually position your house for a bigger lot. And if you need to mitigate said land, the wetland part of it, what that process looks like. We're not really going to talk about that today because that can be a whole another episode. But just be aware that if you're anywhere east, close to the Everglades or anywhere in a rural area, it's more than likely that you're going to be exposed to wetlands. And it's important for you to have an environmental study done to see how much is wet versus dry uplands and dry lands versus wetlands.

So that's basically the number two step that you would go into to really identify your lot and do your due diligence. Number three, and also very important, is going to be a soil density study. Some people call this a geotechnical report. These are really, really important for coastal properties. If you're anywhere near a large body of water, whether it's the beach, whether it's a bay, whether it's a canal, whether it's a big lake, you're going to want to make sure you do some soil density studies. There are geotechnical engineers. Again, all of these things that I'm recommending a survey, environmental study, now talking about soil studies or geotechnical reports, we can help you with. Feel free to contact myself for one of our representatives. We have this whole all-star team of vendors that we can refer you to to get some of these things done. But moving on to the geotechnical. Essentially, it's a soil boring study that goes into what the organic composition of the lot is below ground. So it's basically everything that you can't see. And that'll give you a good idea of what foundation you need. Because not all foundations are created equal, just like not every piece of land is created equal.

So if you have, let's just say, a lot that has more sand or it's a little bit less stable, you might need to go with expanded footers or oversize footers or maybe even pilings, the big piles that drive into the ground for those of you that don't know what that is, just to provide more stability within the soil so you can build your slab on top of that and obviously have your structure on top of that. Now, if your lot happens to be in an area that's already densely populated, if you're in the middle of a community, it's more than likely that the soil is going to be okay. But do consult with your builder, with your contractor, or even with your engineer to see if you'll need a soil density/geotechnical report then. That basically is about as much due diligence as you need to do with the lot. Again, there might be certain aspects that are unique to the area that you're purchasing or owning your land in. For example, there's also endangered wildlife studies that you have to do in certain areas where you have scrub jays or burying burying owls, or maybe you have an Indigenous plant that's growing on your lot.

Those are all things that you need to be aware of before either purchasing or starting construction, because at some point it's going to come up. Even if you think you may not need it, at some point throughout the process in the next steps that I'll explain, your engineer, your architect, your builder will say, Hey, have you had a soil bore study done? Or, Hey, did you know that there's scrub jays or burying owls in your lot? There's a very specific process for those. I've seen little birds hold up a whole construction site for a year plus, sometimes two years. There's lots that are sitting in Marco Island right now in Florida vacant because these burying owls have decided to make it their home. Builders, you can't touch the land until those burying owls naturally leave, and you certainly cannot force them away. That's a big fine. Again, make sure you're doing your due diligence from a survey standpoint, from a geotechnical standpoint, from an environmental study standpoint, which includes some of the other variable anomalies that I just gave you. That way you can move on to the next step, which is really design. You have your lot, you have an idea of what you want to build.

I would suggest that you go to a resource such as an architect or somebody like North Star who is a design builder. The difference between Going directly to an architect versus going to a design builder is the design builder has the whole process encapsulated for you. Basically, we would understand up from what your budget is and what your goals are for the property and what your limitations are going to be, whether it's personal or has to do with with the land itself. Whereas if you go straight to an architect, they're not really too concerned with your budget per se, especially on the residential side. They're more just going to be concerned with the design aspect of it. These are incredible individuals that have incredible artistic knowledge and obviously code knowledge on what's going on in certain jurisdictions. It's important that either they're already engaged with your builder so they know how to manage expectations on the budget side, or at least you're giving them It's not a good idea or you're knowledgeable enough to know, Hey, if I go up three stories versus going a little wider, it's potentially going to cost me more. If I have X amount of windows, it's going to cost me more than having sliders versus having normal single hung windows versus French doors, so on and so forth.

All these things can impact cost, even down to your roof type. A hip roof versus a gable roof versus a flat roof versus a scalian roof. All these are part of the design that you're going to want to know ahead of time, Am I going to make a decision based on the design of a home and how I want this to look like, or am I going to make it based on cost? If I don't care so much about the design, but I'm more cost-sensitive, then it's probably best that you go with a design builder route. Most builders are design builders by nature, but It's a question definitely as you're interviewing your next builder, ask him, Are you a design builder or do you work with an architect? How does your internal process work? Again, at North Star, we are a design builder. From a series of examples, we would bring you in into a conceptual stage where we will literally just brainstorm what design you want. We figure out what your inspirations are, what your aspirations are for the property, certain design elements are important to you, the design intent of the overall build, everything from what I mentioned before to the size of rooms many windows, to a basic floor plan layout where we're conceptualizing a rough floorplan and some rough elevations to bring your idea to life. Right? To take it from from your brain or from your dreams all the way into a piece of paper that we can actually start sketching. The next part of the process, which is a schematic design, right? So if we go from conceptual, where we have some concept floor plans, we have some concept, uh, elevations, some concept, uh, roof designs. Right. And when I say elevations, I don't mean how high or low the house sits. An elevation is the front, the back and each, each side of the house. Right. So what does that look like from a straight on point of view? It's called an elevation, just so you guys know. So there's no confusion, right? So once we have all that determined we can move on to schematic. And schematic is where we're actually putting more detail into the drawings. Right. What are the spans between columns. What are the sizes of rooms.

Right. How many windows and doors am I having procuring a window and door schedule. Whereas what is my truss layout going to look like? You know, how high are my ceilings? Um, you know, the span between your countertop and the back of your kitchen, things of that nature. It's called schematic where there's there's like tangible measurements. So you get an idea of a sense of space. Right. And as you start getting into the schematic, uh, portion of your build, you'll start realizing some harder costs. Also known, as, you know, if I go, if I spend three feet here versus ten feet here, what's going to be my cost difference? Right. And when we have a schematic set of plans to work off of, that makes the whole process a little bit easier from the standpoint of getting you an estimate right, to know exactly how much your build is going to be, we can establish it up front. But as we go through conceptual and schematic, we may have to revise certain things to make sure we're staying within budget.

Right? Otherwise, this thing could just go, you know, from a proposed $500,000 build all the way up to a million, because we kept adding things on to it without being mindful of the budget. Right. Once you have, you've gone through a conceptual design, you've gone through schematic, then you get into actual architectural plans where all the details are laid out, where we're having, you know, different, uh, code enforcement, um, line items that we have to be aware of from the standpoint of elevation, from flood zone, um, from location of how high your house is, uh, versus the maximum height allowed in a certain jurisdiction, for example, these are this is basically what an architect would sign off on, which again, we can handle in House two is North Star. Most builders can too. Um, which would lead you to your construction documents. Right. Which is the final stack of documents that you need in order to submit for a permit. But we'll get to that in a second.

But it's important for you to know that a full architectural stack of drawings, like your full architectural plan, is going to have a site plan. It's going to have all your elevations, it's going to have wall details. It's going to have a window and door schedule. It's obviously going to have a schematic floor plan. It's going to have MEP layouts. It's going to have a lighting schedule. It's going to have lighting design. Um, it'll have all sorts of things depending on what's specific to your property. And basically an engineer could take that and say, okay, I'm going to do my job now, which happens to be the next step of the pre-construction process, and make sure that I can structurally build this home based on my limitations of what materials I'm using and the location of the lot, obviously, um, relative to where the foundation is. So engineers will work on two major, actually three major items. One of us is not, the last one is not as commonly used, but structural engineering.

Right. Which as it sounds, to make sure that your structure, um, can withstand all the code requirements for specific areas, such as in Florida, where we have minimum ratings for wind, minimum ratings for impact, and so on and so forth. Right then the foundation engineer, which which if you remember, I talked about earlier, this type of engineering will determine what type of foundation you have, whether they're spread footers, expanded footers, um, pilings, whether you need a stem wall or not, things of that nature, retaining walls. And that all is figured out through, um, your foundational engineering. And then if your property is either commercial or it's large enough to require civil engineering, that'll be a part of the engineering process too, right? So just to recap, we've gone from conceptual to schematic to architectural construction documents. And now we're working on foundational and structural and perhaps civil engineer that everything all those documents come together form your construction documents. Right. Your CDs right. Your CDs is what you would take to your municipality, um, your or your authority, whoever it is that handles building code enforcement, whoever processes permitting.

And you would submit your builder permit through them your building permit. So the building permit can either be done by you as an individual. If you're not using a builder, it's called an owner. Build and submission for a permit, or your builder would handle this entire process and submit the permit on your behalf. Right? What happens during that process is the jurisdiction, right? Let's just say the city of Naples or the city of Bonita Springs, or the city of Fort Myers, or greater Collier County, uh, Lee County as well. Those are all different jurisdictions that are local to us are reviewing your plans. They have their own set of engineers review plans. They have their own code enforcement that's reviewing plans to make sure your code compliant. Right, whether it's material, whether it's, uh, you know, sizing, foundations, things of that nature. If you're missing anything from your plans, right. Whether you're missing such certain mechanical structures like, hey, where is my AC pad going to be located?

Does it need to be off the ground because of flood zone requirements? Right. Um, you know, what is the span of a certain truss? All these different items that are important, that have to go into the construction documents in order for the jurisdiction to either approve your permit, which is usually a 4 to 6 week process, or send it back from revisions like which what I told you earlier, hey, you're missing certain things. Once they're updated, then you can resubmit and then hopefully at that point only takes one submission. Uh, or one revision, I should say. And then it goes right into permitting and you get your permit approved. Basically, once you have your permit approved, you're shovel ready. That means you are ready to build. You're ready to get rocking and rolling. Um, and your builder at that point is ready to start, um, site prep. But before site prep or any construction happens, you must have a permit, right? A lot of people think that just because you own land, you can go and tear down your own trees.

Absolutely not. You need to at least put if you're just going to do site clearance, you have to pull a site clearing permit. But obviously if you're going to do the full building, then that permit would serve the same purpose and would allow you to start doing site prep. So removing trees, grading the land, bringing in fill, starting to set your set and pour your foundation things of that nature, which we'll get into episode two. Right. I said, this is one of three, um, series events. And what we're doing first was pre-construction, which I've gone over now. It's uh, the next one is going to be, uh, the full construction process, vertical construction, which I'm going to have a lot of fun going over because it's a very detailed process. And then the third one is kind of a surprise, one that nobody ever thinks about. But it's really we're going to talk a lot about pointless items and things to do before you get your SEO and shortly after your SEO to make sure your house is within warranty and everything is working the way it's supposed to.

So once again, as a recap, we talked about design. We talked about some before. We talked about design. We talked about, um, land acquisition, if you don't already have it. Right. And some due diligence that you should be doing and some important documents such as your survey that you should have in place. Right. We talked about conceptual design. We talked about schematic. We talked about architecture and talked about engineering. And we talked about your full completed construction set of documents that go for permitting. So essentially as a as a builder, if I take you on as a customer to build your land, that is the whole process that I have to go through before I even put a shovel on the ground. And it's extremely important because throughout that process, we're determining your budget, your selections, the material that's being used to build your house. Right. As you guys know, you know, we are the future of construction. And in this podcast we talk about things even outside of just traditional construction, which you're used to, which is probably concrete block wood or even steel.

We're building with fiber reinforced polymer, which is an advanced composite building system, very revolutionary. You can go back through some of the other episodes, or maybe look at some of the links below to learn more about FRP and the way that we build houses. But nonetheless, whether you're building with FRP, with wood, concrete or steel, you still have to go through this process. And the little pop quiz question. This whole process has a name basis for pre-construction in development and in the real estate business. We call this land entitlement. Right. So when I take a raw piece of land and I quote unquote develop it by entitling it, I've now improved the value of the property. Right, because I've now gone from raw land and have obviously spent money paying a designer, an architect, an engineer, and maybe even a builder to quarterback the whole process. Right? So I've increased the assessed value of the property just by entitling said property. So that's a very important process. Nothing happens before preconstruction on the lot, as I've mentioned before.

So again, guys, I'm really excited to show this, um, you know, part one of of the three series that we have coming up, uh, please subscribe, please hit on the link below. Um, the more subscribers we can get, the more cool episodes we can continue to do. I can continue to get some cool guests, uh, which I'm really excited about. So pound that subscribe button, hit the like button. Share with all your friends, and I look forward to seeing you on the next episode of the Future of Construction podcast. I'm your host, Kyle McLaughlin. See you next time.