Been told your plot is too steep?

We get this call a lot. Somebody has found a plot with a view they cannot stop thinking about, they have shown it to a builder or two, and they have been told it is not worth the trouble. Sometimes that is right. Often it is not, and what they were actually told is that the builder did not want the job.

So here is our five cents on how to work out which one you are dealing with, before you spend money on it.

It is almost never the slope itself

A slope on its own is not the problem. We have built on ground that looks unbuildable in a photograph. What decides the job is four things, and only one of them is how steep it looks.

• Access. Can a concrete truck, a TLB and a delivery of bricks physically get to where the house goes. This is the one that kills more plots than anything else, and it is the first thing we look at.
• What is under the topsoil. Sand, clay and rock all behave differently and all cost differently. Rock is slow and expensive to cut, but it is beautiful ground to found on once you are into it.
• How much retaining you need. Retaining walls are structure, not landscaping. They get designed by an engineer and they get priced like a building. On a steep site this is often the single biggest line in the budget.
• Where the house sits on the erf. Move a house six metres up or across a slope and the excavation can halve. This is a design decision, and it is worth making it properly before anything else happens.

Get the engineering done before you get a price

This is where a lot of people go wrong, and it is an expensive mistake. On flat ground a builder can walk a plot and give you a number that is roughly right. On a slope they cannot, and anybody who does is guessing.

Until an engineer has looked at the ground and worked out the platform, the retaining and the founding, nobody knows what the earthworks cost. That is not a small part of the budget on a steep site. It can be a quarter of it. A price given before that work is done is not a price, it is a hope, and the difference lands on you later.

We would rather spend a bit up front on getting that right than hand you a cheap number and come back to you in month three.

What we would do before you buy

If you are still deciding on the plot, send us the erf number or just a photo of the site. We will tell you straight whether we think it can be built on, and roughly what makes it hard. That part costs you nothing and it takes us a phone call.

If it looks promising, the next step is a proper site assessment with our engineer. That is where you find out what you are really buying, and it is a lot cheaper than finding out afterwards.

And if your plot is completely flat

Then most of this does not apply to you, and that is a good thing. Flat erf, straightforward house, no drama. We build plenty of those and we like them. The mountain work is what we got known for, but it is not all we do and it is not the only kind of job we want.