Green-thumbed builders?

Builders’ Business is a column by builders for builders. Its objective is to provide a forum, particularly for small business operators, in which to share knowledge, experience, tips and ideas

Q. As a builder, how often do you carry out the landscaping yourself versus engaging a specialist landscaper? 

Firm: Stonewood Homes West Coast

Interviewee: Peter Blight   

Role: Managing Director 

Location: Hokitika

Staff: 12

We rarely do landscaping for our residential projects. Sometimes we might as part of an overall home and land package, and we’ll occasionally get contracted to build a driveway or other smaller jobs such as that, but, apart from smaller standalone projects, we don’t do a lot of landscaping.

Saying that, landscaping is something we’re happy to do, and we’re comfortable with the law and regulations regarding common landscaping aspects such as retaining walls, decks and pergolas, but we’re often not in the right place at the right time to take those jobs on. What I mean by that is, we find clients maximise their budget to get the house built and then think about landscaping further down the road. By that time, we’ve moved on to other work. 

As builders, we don’t normally advertise that landscaping is a skill we offer. We chat to clients during a build about their plans and, if landscaping comes up, we’ll let them know that we can do that as well.

We’ll occasionally subcontract landscaping work if we’re doing a commercial project, but we wouldn’t normally for residential work. If someone asks us to landscape, we’ll normally do it ourselves.

 

Firm: Contemporary Homes 

Interviewee: Jacob Richards 

Role: Managing Director

Location: Nelson

Staff: 9

Whether or not we do the landscaping work on a build can be a bit of a mix. We are happy to carry out all aspects of hard landscaping; however, we rarely do soft landscaping jobs and will refer clients to landscapers for those requests.

For hard landscaping, we’ll work from landscape architects’ plans but also offer our own thoughts and expertise, which sometimes means, with the client’s agreement, the project ends up looking a little different to the original plan. 

Landscape design should be, and is reflective of the building design. I believe the two should have continuity – which we’re perfectly placed to provide. Also, because we’re already on site, we have a good relationship with the client and understand their vision. From our point of view, it’s really rewarding to see a project go from start to finish and know you played a key part in the development of the entire property and the creation of a space for the client to enjoy.

 

Firm: Nolan Building

Interviewee: Dan Nolan  

Role: Director

Location: Timaru

Staff: 6

We’re comfortable doing the landscaping for our clients and it’s a service that we’ll always bring up at the start of a contract. Generally, it depends on the financial position of our clients. If they have the budget for landscaping once our building work is complete, we’re more than happy to do it.

Some clients will just ask us for quotes on aspects such as fencing, which we’re also happy to do.

Our staff are comfortable working across all aspects of hard landscaping work, such as paving areas, driveways and decking, but we’ll subcontract any soft landscaping, such as lawns or planting. We often do a lot of the prep work in those cases, so the subby can hit the ground running.

Landscaping is an area that requires an up-to-date knowledge of regulation, particularly surrounding aspects like retaining walls, and we’re comfortable and committed to staying up to date with all of that.

I think some companies offer landscaping as a bit of an afterthought, as they prefer to focus solely on the build, but we really enjoy working on it. It gives all our staff job satisfaction to see the ‘full package’ after completing a job, instead of leaving a house with elements like a lawn or decking missing.