Alright, so this video is all about the truth and what it's really like to buy a new construction home here in Temecula, California. I'm going to give you my perspective as a real estate agent that's helped dozens and dozens of clients buy new construction homes over the last couple of years. And then also just as a homeowner myself, we've actually purchased two new construction homes within the last few years and also I'll give you some of my learning lessons, some of the pros and the cons that we experienced as well. I think it's going to be good information, so let's go ahead and get into it.

Hey guys. Hey again, my name is Justin Short. I'm a realtor and team leader with a short real estate team here at Keller Williams in Temecula, California and Myriad of California. And this video is all about new construction homes and what it's really like to buy a new build home here in Temecula, California. So I'm going to give you my perspective both as a real estate agent that's helped a lot of clients buy new construction homes, especially over the last few years, and then also just myself as a homeowner and I've actually purchased two different new homes here in the city of Temecula over the last three years. So I think I can give you some good perspective from someone that's actually been through it as well and some different things to take a look at and make sure you take into account before you go on that experience yourself.

But before I get into all the information, do me a favor. If you are liking real estate videos like this, please hit like please sit, subscribe to the channel. Obviously it helps me. Obviously we're trying to continue to grow it and then if you guys have any real estate questions, you can feel free to reach out anytime. So you can call, you can text, you can email me, my information's either down below this video in the description or at the end of the video. You're going to see all my contact info there as well. But you guys can reach out anytime. I have people that reach out all the time, ask questions, ask for some advice, maybe at least point you in the right direction or give you some information about the city here or the local cities or if you guys have any specific real estate questions and want some help with your search, of course, myself and my team, we would love to help you out with that and help you through that process.
Obviously that's how iron a living, that's how I pay my bills and would love for you guys to reach out and be able to help you through that as well. So feel free and give me a call, but we'll go ahead and get into all the info here. So again, we're talking about new construction homes. I'll start with my experience and I had some learning lessons, but I have purchased myself and my family, so it's myself. I'm married, I have two young kids, my daughter is nine, my son is six, and we've done this over the last three years. We've actually purchased two new construction homes. The reason we bought two, they were both brand new, they're both beautiful, very open concepts and all these nice finishes and probably nicer than any home I ever thought that I would ever live in, right? Very, very pretty.

But the first one ended up not being a great fit for myself and my family because obviously to me one of the things that we're going to talk about, we kind of made a mistake on what we purchased and what the idea of the property was in our mind ended up not being what it was on a day-to-day basis and how it really affected us. So I'll talk a little bit more about that as we get into it, but I guess I mentioned all that just to know I have some perspective on what it's like to actually purchase something here that's new and deal with the pros and the cons of a new construction home. It's not going to be for everybody. There are some really, really good things and some cool things about new construction and there's some things that are frustrating, they're expensive, they're hidden costs and things you don't necessarily think about until you actually get down to it.

And so just things that I always talk to my clients about and make sure you got to really think this through and make sure it's going to be the right decision for you and your family. So we'll start with the good stuff. So the pros, most everybody that I talk to that's a client or a potential client loves the idea of buying a new construction home. Buying a new home is it's really enticing because no one has ever lived in it. A lot of times you get to pick out almost all of the features, so like the cosmetics, so cabinet color, cabinet style, countertop, color, counter style and material backsplash or no backsplash, you can upgrade maybe to bigger cabinets a lot of the times you can pick out the flooring, paint, colors, baseboards. You can maybe add some options as far as getting a covered patio or a California room, maybe upgrade, add some windows or add a sink in the laundry room.

You can do a lot of things with a new construction home upfront and kind of pick and choose and get it closer to exactly what you want. That are much more difficult to do in a resell home when it's a resell home and the house has been built for 10 years and if you want to add a sink in the laundry room, you got to run a water line, you got to cut through the drywall. It's a lot more difficult to do rather than the builder can just do it while the house is being framed and it's super seamless. They just pop a hole in the drywall at the end and it's easy to do. So those things are really, really nice and people always like the idea of being able to pick out all the finishes, customize, pick out all the features, et cetera, right?
So that's a big pro about new construction. Also, just the fact that it's brand new and no one has ever lived there, right? It's always going to be a positive, right? You don't have to worry about who was here before. Some people, maybe someone passed away in the house 10 years ago and some people different maybe religions or beliefs or whatever, don't feel comfortable with that. Maybe somebody lived there and tried to be a themselves, but they really sucked at all these different around the house projects and so they screwed up a lot of these little projects and the fan is hung wrong and they replaced a window, but they did a crummy job. You don't have to worry about any of that with the new construction because it's all brand new. No one's ever lived there, no one's ever messed with it. No one's ever painted the walls and you get a warranty with the new construction homes as well.

So once you move in, most builders are typically going to give at least a one year warranty that's going to cover pretty much everything. So besides your own wear and tear, but if you move in and the plumbing stops working or the dishwasher bust or the stove stops or the AC unit breaks, anything like that, the builder's usually going to have a warranty that's going to kick in and be able to fix those items and they'll send someone out the next day to take care of those things. So that's a big plus as well. And typically there's some type of a five year and a 10 year warranty that covers different parts and components as well, but those are benefits to having new construction and so it's always going to be a nice thing on the side. On the flip side, maybe this is probably where I can have more useful info for you guys, but there's a lot of things to be careful of.

It's not as easy as people necessarily think, and there's a lot of hidden costs that are involved buying a new home as well. So this is something that people don't always necessarily consider when you buy a new construction home. You really have to think about the timeline and make sure that buying that new home is going to fit into the timeline that you and your family are on. Because right now the way it works is when a builder, you have this big massive builders, they're KB Homes or Lennar Homes or Woodside Homes or whoever the builder is, they're building, let's say they're building a thousand different homes here in the subdivision, right? Well, they're going to release a section or a phase of those homes at each time. They may release 3, 5, 7, 10 of 'em at once, but when they release that phase, those houses that they're releasing the construction on, those are probably not going to be completed for anywhere between four to six months depending on the builder.

They're going to have different policies there, but you as a homeowner, you as a buyer, you are going to have to agree to buy that home upfront and then wait until the construction is completed. Usually it's going to be a dirt lot or very, very close to a dirt lot that they're actually releasing. The challenge for a lot of people is we've, I've just sold my home and I am looking for a new home to live in and I like the idea of buying a brand new construction home, but I can't wait six months to have a place for me and my family to go. So that's a big issue and that's something a lot of people don't necessarily think about, especially when it is a seller's market right now where most homes are selling relatively quickly when those lots are released, for the most part they're getting snapped up, they're finding buyers for them very, very quickly right away within a week, within two weeks, and so that there's not going to be much, there's going to be a long time between the time you agree to buy the home until the time that home is ready.

So people have many different solutions. The most ideal situation for you is that you are able to buy that home without needing to sell another home to sell a home that you're currently in. So that could mean you are going to keep your home and rent it out and you can qualify for the next mortgage without selling this home. That's ideal. Then if it takes six months, it's not a big deal. You just continue to live in your old home till the new one's ready. It's easy. A lot of times people do need to sell their home to buy the new one and if that's the case, you're going to have to find a buyer over here and you're going to have to have some type of a temporary housing situation in those four to six months until the new home is ready. So that could mean you're going to go and get a month to month rental for four to six months.
It could mean, hey, we're going to go live with family for four to six months. It could be, hey, we're going to go and we're going to live in our trailer for four to six months and cruise around and vacation a little bit and then when the house is ready, we're going to go ahead and move into that and get back to a normal house. But that timeline is something that you really got to think about and depending on your situation, if you're in a rental and your landlord gave you notice and say, Hey, you got to be out of here soon, new construction home's probably not going to be a great option for you. So you really got to think about that and make sure it's going to fit for you and your family there. So second thing I wanted to mention as a potential con is just the extra HOA costs that are typically involved with new construction homes.

So most new construction homes and I would say probably 85% are going to have some type of an HOA and a lot of times, especially in these newer communities, they tend to be higher than others that are in the area. So it could be in this Temecula area that HOA could be anywhere from a hundred to $250 a month. So where a lot of people, they don't necessarily want to pay that or are able to pay that each month. So you got to look at that and think about that extra cost on what that HOA is going to cost you on a monthly basis. You are going to get some benefits from that, right? Typically there's some amenities, community pools, community spas, clubhouses, that type of stuff. But you got to think about that cost and make sure it's going to be affordable for you.

Number three is definitely another one that's going to be a hidden cost. It's going to be the higher taxes and special assessments that the new construction homes tend to have. So I've talked about this in a lot of my other videos, but most new construction communities, especially these master plan communities with these big builders tend to have higher taxes and what those are also called, they're special assessments. Those are extra taxes that when the builder goes in, they buy a plot of land, they buy this big a hundred acres, whatever it is, they subdivide it, they're going to build a thousand houses. They're not just building those houses, they're also building a lot of infrastructure to support those houses. So that means they're putting in streets, they're putting in sidewalks, they're putting in curbs, they're putting in drainage systems. They are a lot of times building like a fire station.
They're building community parks, walking trail, all types of different stuff that they may have to put in and build besides just the houses themselves. So what used to happen is the builder used to just go ahead and pay those costs as part of their building costs and somewhere in the mid two thousands they kind of realized, I dunno if it's a law that changed or what, but they ended up being able to pass on a lot of those costs for that infrastructure onto the homeowner and they do that in the form of special assessments. So per year those extra special assessments might cost you anywhere from 3000 to $4,500 a year in extra taxes. So that could be anywhere from an extra 250 to $400 a month in extra taxes that you're paying part of these special assessments that are part of the new construction.

So a lot of people don't realize this until they get into the process and dealing with loans and all this stuff, but the magic question that you as a homeowner and a home buyer want to ask when you are talking to a new construction community or builder or anything like that, you want to ask 'em what is your total tax rate, including all your special assessments and that's the magic question to make sure you're going to get all the information. So the tax rate that's standard kind of across the board in Temecula and Rietta area, it's going to be right about 1.15%, right? That's kind of your base tax rate across the board. But from there, different neighborhoods are going to have those different special assessments. So then the builders should be able to tell you what that tax rate is with all those special assessments.
So your tax rate may be 1.4%, might be 1.5, might be 1.8, it might be 2%, right? But you want to know what that tax rate is that's going to be able to tell you what your monthly cost is and how much more in taxes you are actually going to be paying. So that's a big one. You want to pay attention to property taxes out here, especially in the temic myriad area. The fourth thing that wanted to mention, just some varying costs and other things that they might seem less significant, but they definitely add up and this is something as my experience buying a new home, these are things that cost me a lot more money than I thought they were going to. So number one is the amount of upgrades through the builder. So when we talked about it's nice being able to buy a new home, you get to pick out all these finishes and materials and all the pretty stuff that's in your home.

A lot of times you'll get to go down to a design center and you sit there in this big office and there's five different sinks to choose from and four different toilets and 25 different and different colors and shapes and all these different things. So it's nice to be able to pick all that out, but all those things cost money and they probably cost a lot more than you think. So typically what I recommend to people is when you are buying a new construction home and you are going to go down to the builder and go to their design center and pick out all these fancy things, you want to keep your purchases at the design center to as little as possible, as few as possible. You want to buy as little as you can through the builder and if those are upgrades that you want to do after you close, you can always do them in the future. So the biggest one is flooring. The flooring costs through the builder can be super, super expensive.
For example, my specific house when we were going down to the design center, we picked out some nice flooring that we liked. It was luxury vinyl plank flooring, which is very, very common in the area we've installed in other houses. We're super familiar with it. I've had a lot of clients use it, it's nice, it's very popular. So LVP flooring, we got a bid through the builder and they wanted to charge us $50,000 to put flooring inside our house. The house was 3000 square feet, so it's not a small house by any means, but they wanted $50,000 to install it through them. I got a quote from a flooring company here in town here in Marietta and they ended up charging me just under 12,000. So the price was over four times as much through the builder as it was if I were just to hire somebody outright.

So it can be astronomical, the flooring is the big one, but typically if it's anything that you can do after the fact, you really want to do that. What I do recommend people to do through the builder are going to be things that are kind of like the one-off, right? So if there's some countertops that you want to upgrade and it's a few thousand bucks to get this nice marble that you like or this nice material or quartz or whatever it is, hey, this is probably a good time to go ahead and do that, right? Because the odds are you as a homeowner, once you move in, you're probably not going to spur and spring the money to do that yourself. For another, you might be 10, 12, 15 years until you're going to pay to do the countertops. So if it costs you an extra few thousand bucks upfront, hey, it's going to be worth it.
Yeah, maybe they're too expensive but there's going to be no reason to change it and pay out of your pocket for new stuff for a long time. So that's a big one. Lighting a lot of times it's a lot easier for the builder to run any type of extra lighting or LED lighting or cans or anything like that at the time of construction rather than you doing that after you close escrow, especially in two story home running wires downstairs can be super complicated. There's not much room to run. So if that's something that they offer and you are interested it, that's probably a good time to go ahead and do that. Or things like maybe in my house they gave us an option to upgrade to add a sink in the laundry room. Well, for us that was worth it. It costs like an extra 250 bucks.

They ran a water line in there for us and if it's, so we took advantage of that. If we wanted to add that waterline in the future, it's probably going to cost 2000 bucks and they're going to have to bust on the drywall and I got to pay someone to redo the drywall. It's going to cost a lot more. So it's a lot easier to do upfront why the house is empty, why the house is being framed, et cetera. But you got to be really careful. Don't get carried away. Everything probably is going to cost two to three times more in the design center than it would if you were to pay somebody out of pocket. But certain things that you're going to want to take advantage of, just especially be careful of the flooring for sure. Then the next thing I want to talk about is just any type of hardscaping or landscaping that you're going to be doing.
So when you buying a new construction home, what you're doing is you're buying, it's a brand new home. You're going to pick out whatever upgrades you want, but in the lot back you're going to have absolutely nothing. So it's going to be a piece of dirt. All you get is this little two foot by two foot little concrete pad that's super tiny and the rest of your yard's going to be dirt. And most communities, especially if you have an HOA, are going to tell you that you have to develop your backyard and complete it within a certain amount of time. It might be three months, six months or 12 months. 12 months is usually the longest that they're going to give you. And so that means you are going to have to shell out some money to go ahead and pay for all that, and it's not cheap.

Hardscaping and landscaping. So if you're going to do concrete, if you're going to do a patio cover, if you're going to do shrubs, if you're going to put grass in, if you're going to do turf or if you want to do a pool, obviously that's going to be super expensive as well, but it's going to be a lot of money, even probably the lowest that you're going to get just for a little bit of concrete, a little bit of grass. For an average size lot, I think people are going to be lucky to spend 12,000, $15,000. That's going to be on the low end and all the way up. You can spend 40, 50, 60, well over a hundred thousand dollars if you're going to do a pool. Really, the sky's the limit, how nice you want to go, but it is not going to be a cheap thing to do and worst case scenario, they'll vary low end, you do it the budget way.
You got to set aside 15, 10, $15,000 to be able to do kind of just something in the backyard so you don't get an HOA violation. So that's a big ticket item and something that you really got to think about if you are going to be buying a new construction home. The other thing I wanted to mention is window coverings. So that is something that we did not think enough about. So you walk into these houses and they're just windows, right? They don't give you any blinds, they don't give you any shades, they don't give you any shutters, anything like that. My wife happened to the nicer fancier shutters that are pretty and white and that everyone likes, but they're not cheap. They costs a lot of money. I think we spent like $6,000, $7,000 just on shutters throughout the house. That's something you really got to think about and those things add up.

So you're going to pay money for flooring out of pocket, you're going to pay money for window coverings out of pocket if you're going to pay money to do your backyard out of pocket. Those are going to be big deals and something that you really, really got to think about. Then the last thing that I wanted to mention to you is just kind of giving you my experience. So I told you we bought two different new homes. They're both super, super nice, but what we did not think enough about is how the house that we were buying, what living in that house would be like on a daily basis once construction was completed and the rest of the community was built. So what that means is the house that we bought, it was on kind of a long road. We have young kids, we like playing outside with the kids and throwing balls and riding bikes and all that type of stuff.
And we kind of looked at the map and we thought traffic would flow a certain way. And after we moved in, it turned out that all the traffic went right in front of our house. People were speeding by constantly and it became a real headache. Honestly, after three, four months, my wife and I looked at each other and we were super frustrated by the amount of traffic, how fast people were driving in front of the house. We didn't feel safe playing out with our small kids at the time. There were six and four playing outside out front throwing the balls around and stuff. And that's why we ended up selling the house and moving to another new home that wasn't going to have that concern. So we made a mistake by not putting enough thought into that and realizing how much that was going to affect us affect our quality of life and how much and how unhappy we were going to be because of that.

So you really got to do a good job of being able to project not only the house, but you have to project what that street is going to look like in front of you, behind you think about there's going to be traffic if the area's going to grow, if there's going to be more traffic in two years from now than there is today. You got to really think about how the area is going to mature and how that is going to be the right lot for you and your family going forward. So just being able to really project things I think is a big thing. And then the last point I wanted to make is we we're talking about new construction homes here in Temecula. The challenge for a lot of people is there are not a ton of new construction homes that are currently going on in Temecula.
It's really pretty limited. The reason being is the city of Temecula has been been, most of the homes were built mid nineties to early two thousands. And so because of that, almost all the space is taken up. So there's not much vacant land that's left for new build, new build construction. So it's very, very limited out there. There's two or three different new construction communities that are currently going on. Both of 'em are kind of getting towards the end of their phases. There are a handful more that are in the process of opening over the next year to two years, but there are few and far between. There's not a lot of options out there. If you're looking for a bigger house or a smaller house, you might only have one or two communities to choose from. So there's not a ton that's out there.

Because of that, a lot of people do decide to look at new construction to look at some of the surrounding cities. So Marietta has a lot more options. City of Menifee has a lot more options. City of Wild DeMar has a lot more options, like Elsner has a lot more options and so does Winchester. So many of the surrounding cities have a lot of other new construction options for you to choose from. So just something to think about if you don't see a ton of great options here in Temecula. So hopefully that's some good information for you guys. If you have any questions about new construction or anything we can do to help you out with your search, of course we would love to help you. It is super important for you to know, and I've mentioned this in my other videos, but if you do want to buy a new construction home myself, if you want us to help you to be your agent or any other agent that you want to use, they must be with you on your first visit to that community.
So if you wanted me to help you with your purchase or someone on my team or another agent, and if you did not contact us to set up an appointment for that first visit, if you go in, if you meet with the new home sales rep and you want us to come back with you on your second visit, they will not work with us. They will not let us represent you in the transaction. So if that's important to you, of course I would love to help you or someone on my team would love to help you of course. But if you want us to do that, you're going to need to make an appointment with us. We're going to need to meet you and to be able to register and help you through that process. So hopefully some good information you guys can feel free to reach out, you can call, you can text, you can email. Please hit like please hit subscribe and hopefully talk to you soon. Thanks.