How did you get approval to self build?
My husband and I are researching loan options to build our home. We'd like to self build--he's been in construction for 15+ years and a licensed GC for 10+ years working evenings and weekends building houses. However, he has a full time job, so we're being told that he cannot GC our own build. Has anyone been able to GC their own build while working full time? If so, what kind of lending institution did you use?
I’ve seen others talk about being their own GC, I’m mostly interested in how they were able to do that.
NOTE: This man is not human when it comes to building. He accomplishes more in one evening than other builders do in a day and more in one day than other builders do in a week. He's been like this for 15 years. It sounds like an exaggeration, but it's not. Even the builders that he works for say that he runs circles around them. Plus, the house is designed to be very basic to build. There's nothing fancy about it in terms of the layout and roofline, basically a linear house with a single pitch roof, so, in theory, building it in 12 months is feasible.
We've looked at a few construction loans where we could have a "builder" but we would do a lot of the work. These loans, however, force us to show $100k+ more for the loan more than what we actually need to cover the costs of labor that we would be performing ourselves. For example, we are being forced to show $20,000 in roofing labor even though we will be installing the roof ourselves and not paying anyone $20,000. They won't let us commit to paying anything out of pocket even though we have the funds to. AND they require us to show a minimum of 10% builder profit to the tune of $50k+ even though our builder isn't charging us that. Basically it sounds like the bank wants to plan for anyone doing the work becoming not alive or otherwise incapacitated so the cost of hiring someone else to do the build or another sub would be covered. With the extra >$100k on the loan (even though we wouldn't use it), it puts us over our debt to income limit. Our only debt is the property and we both have very high credit scores. And we have probably about $300,000 in equity in the property (which has all utilities and a high-end 1,600 sf shop).
Any advice?