Cost estimate for a single-family house near Heidelberg

That probably remains the secret of the GU. Everyone is different. I think the GU with a selection center mainly earns from that. However, we have had almost everything invoiced directly by the specialist tradesmen, without the GU in between.

Quick side question: how does the general contractor then make money if they pass on the individual trades (surcharges) 1:1? [emoji848] As I said, just look at the GC surcharge. Any GC would be silly not to apply the usual markup, right? But as long as you have a good feeling and have received a (subjectively) fair price, it can be irrelevant [emoji4]

For example, with the planning. In addition, I think that a GC / general contractor (provided there is a fixed core group of craftsmen and regular orders are given to the same companies) will be able to purchase more cheaply than if a private person commissions a company once. With a bit of research, the support of a construction expert already in the presales phase, a preliminary sampling, and common sense, finding a good GC works too. We even had three GCs to choose from with whom we could have built.

Stair studio and electrician invoiced the upsizing directly. Tile prices are listed in the calculation and were the marked prices, so he just took his discount for himself. Neither the general contractor nor architects work for free. However, mine and probably also Nordlys's have committed to a certain fairness. The money has to be earned with the house and not with the socket that is added.

We handled it a bit differently; our home builder is probably a general contractor (at least if I understood correctly here). Normally, he takes over the house and coordinates all other trades except for painting and flooring (except tiles, those are included), and he also gets paid for managing that. But since we feel like neighbors and my "uncle by choice" took on part of the supervision with us, it was like this for us: we received offers from all trades and had about 3 weeks to review everything.

Then one afternoon we met in the boss’s office with us, my uncle, and the bosses (all more or less distant acquaintances or neighbors) of the trade companies. We discussed, changed things, negotiated, etc., and within about 2 weeks the possibly revised offers came in. For choices, we always met directly with the bosses at the companies or looked at their suppliers.

And so the entire build went smoothly; yes, we had to take care of a lot ourselves, but if something really didn’t go smoothly (which happened exactly once), we just called the head of the home building company, and he put some pressure on, and it worked out.

Certainly not everyone’s thing, and the company only does this very rarely here—basically only in cases like ours that are somewhat "family-related."

We are glad we did it this way and only used the classic providers like Viebrockhaus, Town & Country, and so on just for initial information.

Oh, and regarding the costs, we paid 1560 euros per sqm for the house. Landscaping and carport are extra.