Building on Your Land: Where to Start

Are you a landowner? Congratulations! If you own land, and you know you want to build a home on it, do you know what the next steps are? Here are five things you should start preparing for to make the process a smooth as possible:

1) Plan Your Budget

This sounds like a no-brainer, but many of us don’t know where to start when creating a budget for building your new home. Start by getting pre-approved for a construction loan. Once you know what you can afford, you can create your budget with that in mind. Get a free pre-approval from our preferred lender, Premier Bank.

2) Tour a Model Home

Schedule an appointment with one of our New Home Consultants and visit a Wayne Homes Model Center to tour a model home–whether virtually or in person. We offer a fully virtual experience, so you can get all of your questions answered and take a home tour without ever leaving your home. Regardless of how you experience your appointment, you’ll talk to your New Home Consultant about what is most important to you in your new home, as well as what you like and don’t like about your current home. We call this the Personal Value List.

3) Choose a Floor Plan

Once you’ve narrowed down your budget, your must-haves, have an understanding of your lot, and have a feel for the style of home you want, you can confidently select a floor plan. And, if you are torn between a few different plans, just remember–with Wayne Homes, you can blend the best of them all together in your ideal custom home. We will work with you to be sure your home is right for your land. For example, if your lot is sloping, we can customize most homes to have a walkout basement to complement the grade of the land.

4) Site Evaluation

Once you’ve met with a New Home Consultant and determined the floor plan that is just right for you, we offer a complimentary site evaluation. This helps you understand what you are getting into with your selected lot. Be sure to check out our Common Land Issues 101 to watch out for and our helpful Tips for Shopping for Land. We will walk the lot with you and point out what next steps you need to take in order to build on the land. We will discuss everything from utilities to driveways and home positioning.

5) Lot Prep

Will you need septic? Will you need a well? Will you need trees cleared off of your lot? What kind of prep will you need done? These are items you will want to pull permits for and begin work on after your site evaluation and loan closing. These will factor into your overall budget, so work with the Wayne Homes team to figure the cost of these lot prep steps, so you can understand what the overall costs to build are. Here are the basics–

• Excavation: Once you are ready to build with Wayne, you will be assigned a Production Administrator to help you.
• Permits: Your Production Administrator will walk you through the permitting process as well as the construction loan process. Since building a home on your lot requires that the homeowner applies for their own permits, and that can vary from state to state and county to county, your PA will guide you through the process step by step.
• Utilities: Your lot may already have electricity and/or gas available, but if they don’t, we will help you work with the utility companies to get these utilities available for the build.

Visit our process page to learn more about the Wayne Homes process for building on your lot.

Do you have questions that weren’t answered here? Contact us! We are standing by to address all your concerns, so you can start on your path to your new Wayne home.

About Wayne Homes

Wayne Homes is a custom homebuilder in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and West Virginia (see all Model Home Centers). We offer more than 50 fully customizable floorplans and a team dedicated to providing the best experience in the home building industry. For more information, Ask Julie by Live Chat or call us at (866) 253-6807.