Custom Home Builder Collingwood

Before an application is even accepted, Collingwood wants a Zoning Certificate. The Town has required one for new houses since January 1, 2022, and it confirms with Planning Services that the house fits the zoning before Building Services reviews the construction. After that, the application itself has to include the documents below. We have grouped them by what they reveal about the people you hire.

Collingwood is unusually candid about what slows a permit down. On its new house page, Building Services says incomplete drawings typically cause the majority of all delays, and that revisions can add several weeks or more. A complete application gets a decision in 10 business days; an incomplete one takes more than 20. Zoning review, done by Planning Services as a required applicable law, generally adds three to five business days on top.

That is a design-team question as much as a construction one, and Collingwood custom home builders differ on it more than on anything else. At A&R the person who carries a house from idea to approvals is Laura McAdam, who handles design, planning applications and municipal approvals. We start from our own catalogue of 82 plans or from a blank page, produce preliminary drawings, elevations and 3D renderings so you can see the house before it is committed, and prepare the permit set and the applications ourselves. You see the same drawings the Town sees.

Honesty about distance matters when you are hiring a builder. We do not have an office in Collingwood. Our base is in Innisfil, Ontario, where our model home and design centre have stood on the Highway 400 side of town for years, and it is where we will sit down with you to go through plans and finishes. For a Collingwood build we come to the lot: a site visit and evaluation is the second step of our process, before anything is drawn, and our site supervisor, Darcy McMahon, coordinates the trades from framing through completion.

The work closest to Collingwood that our own site documents is on the same stretch of Georgian Bay. Our Homes magazine ran a multi-page feature in its Fall 2019 Barrie edition on a cottage we built in the Tiny Beaches area of Georgian Bay, for a couple who had first built with Rene Ouellet Jr. years earlier near Wasaga Beach and came back for the second one. Our portfolio also includes a 2017 custom home on Georgian Bay with more than 2,000 sq ft and a finished basement, and a 2018 small-footprint custom build in Tiny Township.

If you have been reading lists of the best custom home builders Collingwood has, or comparing home builders in Collingwood Ontario by their photos, ask the same thing of each one: where is the nearest finished house I can look at, and who will actually be on my site?

Most of the homes we build start from one of our 82 published plans in four lines, then change: walls move, a garage grows, the whole plan flips to face a view. Use the filter to narrow the catalogue by size, bedrooms and bathrooms, and bring the two or three you like to the first conversation. Every plan can be built as drawn or reshaped for a Collingwood lot, and we design from scratch as well.

New home builders in Collingwood Ontario all work under the same Town rules, and so do the custom home builders Collingwood Ontario families shortlist, so the comparison comes down to people and records. Collingwood calls itself one of the fastest-growing municipalities in Canada on its own housing page, and in a busy market the builders worth calling are the ones whose paperwork is ready before yours is due.