First talks with home fertilizer manufacturers - tips?

Think about how many hours of research, discussion, and test driving you spend selecting a car.
Just a planning appointment for a kitchen easily takes 4 hours, and after that you have the layout and colors, maybe appliances, but no interior design yet. You even do that multiple times for price comparison purposes.

What I want to say is, basics deserve time investment. Spending two hours lamenting about the ridge height and number of floors is absolutely okay. You will regularly encounter such "waste of time" in the house building project, as long as you don't buy a developer property.

What I want to say is that basics deserve time investment. Spending two hours lamenting about the ridge height and number of floors is absolutely okay. Such "waste of time" will regularly occur to you in the house building project, unless you buy a developer property.

Thanks. However, I suspect you misunderstood something. It's not about MY time, but the seller's time. And whether the first sales conversation generally serves to get stuck on one detail or rather to work through the broad range (i.e., all those topics already mentioned in the thread). Two hours alone is not much time for that. Regarding the ridge height topic, already here in the forum two hours have gone into it, about 1.5 hours of phone calls with people who know a bit about it, 2-3 hours of discussion within the family, and several evenings in which I have thought long about possible consequences of changes to the floor plan if case (a), (b), or (c) occurs. The time factor for preliminary planning is indeed sacred (time is always sacred), but here we certainly do not skimp.

So, to put my question briefly in another way, because maybe I didn’t succeed well enough before: How should I proceed in the first conversation concerning a complicated development plan (regarding ridge height/building height – regarding the decision of 2 full floors with flat roof or 1 full floor + 2nd floor with 1.60 m knee wall with flat shed or pyramidal roof)? Should I make the topic itself a big focus or first throw myself onto all the other (felt like a million) questions that have already been very helpfully raised here?

If this is such an important, special aspect, you should feel free to address it and expect a time commitment (although a salesperson may not be the expert for this).

The initial consultation, in my opinion, lives from gut feeling. The result should be: Will it work with them or are they out? We, my wife and I, needed and need a sense of seriousness to answer this question, do they listen, can you do something with the plan B, do they get pushy... Original tone of a salesperson... oh, you want a little place like that? He was out! So name your must-haves and the plan B problems and wait to see what happens. I give you the real advice to pay close attention to your feeling. Karsten

The whole intuition thing is true, but later it may no longer be correct when problems arise. Then it is only important to have a good expert and possibly a lawyer. In the initial consultation, you should definitely mention that you yourself will send a construction supervisor or an expert. If the BU does not accept this - we have never done it that way - stay away. Regarding the original question: In my opinion, the development plan is already important, because what is the BU supposed to offer if he does not know the requirements?

(Look also at which posts I “like” – then you’ll see, even without me having to quote them all, what I consider worthy of agreement has already been said)

You are laypeople, meaning you have the license to act a little clueless. Take from the property only the size, footprint, and number of floors. Details like exactly balancing the eave height do require their proper time allocation, but not in the introductory conversation.

These are things that can certainly be discussed with candidates from round 1, but not in round 1. Because they only become important with those round 1 candidates you meet again in round 3.

That means I align myself with the positions of my predecessors, but differentiated according to the importance of the rounds. At the first dance tea, rings are not yet exchanged, so do not put yourself under pressure to produce approval-ready designs in the first round.

In this sense, it also does not matter yet what hat the house will wear. Whether eave and ridge heights fit later is not important in round 1 – it’s more about whether a five-degree roof pitch change already leads to a surcharge that price-wise equates the otherwise catalog house with an individual design.

House sellers operate on average in the same incompetence league as real estate agents. The idea that there could be zoning plan-reading masters among them is almost amusing