How much does it cost to build a single family in St. Augustine, Florida?

Or more specifically, how I quote a price to build a new construction like this?

So you are tired of hearing from the builder "it depends". The experienced builders will tell you "it depends" because they know every project is different, and most of them lost on a project in the past from quoting a customer simply based on a price per square foot quote and they learned it the hard way that it's not so simple. You want to pay a fair price but don't want to be taken advantage of, also you want to have the trust that whoever you hire, they will complete the project on time, to the standard and specifications required, and on budget.

You want an experience builder to lay it out for you? Sure, this is how much it cost to build a 1250 sq ft 3 bed 2 bath 1 car garage in St. Augustine, FL. I'm listing every cost codes in my book. At the end of the day, I'm not doing this for fun, I'm doing this to make money. This is what I tell my customers: my management price is $10,000 per month. A typical 1250 sq ft house takes me 3-4 months to build, to make things simple, I would simple estimate total construction cost = my cost + $35,000. So that's the minimum number I'm looking for to build a house for someone and feel good about it. Obviously if that's my bottom-line, when I quote for someone, I need to have a buffer to cover any "surprises", and the price for the "surprises" is the one that a customer can truly negotiate with the builder. I can tell you my "surprise" budget is $10,000. So if a customer wants a fixed price contract, my quote to them will be a very fast cost estimate + $45,000 is my price to build anything less than 1800 sq ft house in St. Augustine/St. Johns County.

If a customer wants to potentially save about $10,000 in construction cost, that customer can take on some of the risk from me, the builder, and negotiate a construction management contract. In this case, my construction management fee would be $35,000 for the entire project. I also provide some incentives for paying all fees upfront with a $5,000 discount. If a customer has multiple lots at the same location and would like to build multiple houses of the same floor plan at the same time, I will quote an additional $5,000 per house discount.

No builders to my knowledge show their customer this spread sheet. Here are my cost codes to build the San Marco Floor Plan on 10/19/2023:

You can see, the vertical cost is very predicable unless we experience a huge economic turmoil that has huge impact on labor and/or material cost.

However, the development cost, or the horizontal cost are drastically different from project to project. These costs are:

1. Survey

2. Land clearing, demolition, well/septic abandonment

3. Utilities (power, public water taps, public sewer taps, new well, new septic, propane/natural gas)

4. Impact fee (For some reason impact fee for St. Johns County has grown to an unbelievable level. To my knowledge, no other counties charge tens of thousands as fees to just so you can develop a land.)

5. Trees removal. These trees are the ones that cannot be mowed down by a tractor and needs surgically cut down by a tree contractor

6. Culvert/Ditches/Swells

7. Additional landfills (my price typically factor in 12 truck loads of dirt that will cover building a house on a relatively flat lot)