Hello fellow expat community. Me and my wife are at the point to where we are starting to look at property, specifically in Palawan. She is dual citizen and can buy land. Even though we are years away from retirement, we are going to purchase our retirement land now. We are doing our research and I wanted to ask the community if anyone has any information for a list of reliable, good and honest (or as close to) a home builder/contractor in Palawan or has personally had a good experience with one?
I don't live in Palawan, but I just wanted to share some very general information about building a home over here.
There are good quality builders over here, but, as you can imagine, the construction industry here is a little bit different from what you'd see elsewhere.
A few years ago my sister-in-law (dual citizen) built her home over here, and in her case she was able to hook up with a pretty good construction outfit by going through her architect. Her home isn't a mansion, I think that it would be equivalent to a three bedroom 1,500 square foot home back in the states, and it is probably one of the closest to western construction standards I've seen over here. On the downside, I think that the expense of building her home was in the neighborhood of $65,000 - $70,000 (USD) when you convert the Pesos, and the stress associated with dealing with the various issues which kept cropping up was so great that it caused her husband to have a heart attack, which eventually killed him. So dealing with construction people over here is completely different from dealing with them back home. Also, she did have to have some remedial work done over the years, (mainly electrical stuff) but she doesn't have any cracks in her walls, and her floors are all level.
No in my case, here is a complete rundown on some of the mistakes my wife and I made while building our house in 2012.
We relied upon my wife's relatives to find a construction crew for us.
The foreman hired by my wife's other sister didn't know how to read an architect's drawing.
Too many workers were hired, the foreman didn't know how to supervise or keep track of hours.
The foreman didn't know how to order supplies in advance, so sometimes he would come to us and say he was out of cement, and then the crew would sit around being paid while we waited for another truckload to be delivered.
A lot of our construction people were shabu (Breaking Bad crystal meth) addicts, and as a result, they were not able to work without their fix. Right now there is a bit of a crackdown going on in regards to shabu addicts, so if you're a foreigner, you probably don't want to be associated with such people, and probably best to keep them at arm's length.
Theft was a huge huge problem during the construction of our home, and I would estimate that probably 15% - 20% of the materials purchased to build our home were stolen by our construction workers.
Ready mix concrete isn't available over here, so when a house, a sidewalk, or a wall needs to be built, the locals mix their own concrete by mixing cement, sand, and gravel. There are at least two problems with this. Number one, most of the locals I've dealt with don't know or care about properly mixing concrete, and they almost always do not use the right proportions of cement, sand, and gravel to make your concrete, and they typically use way too much water, which causes cracks when drying. Also, the sand and gravel we ordered was contaminated with soil, which is a typical problem over here. The problem with soil is that it will dissolve and will flow out of the concrete when it gets wet in the rain. This will cause whatever has been built out of the soil contaminated concrete to literally melt and dissolve within a few short years.
Here is what I should have done:
I should not have relied upon some dingbat housewife to find us a good construction crew. There was an old carpenter who lives in our barangay, but my mother-in-law didn't want us to use that guy because she was worried that her own daughter would be offended, if we didn't go with the people she recommended to us. So family politics caused us to make a poor decision which cost us a lot of money.
When you first meet the foreman, make it clear to him that you are still in the planning stages, and that you haven't actually made a decision on when you're going to start building. In our case, we had a casual conversation with the foreman recommended by the second sister-in-law, and somehow a miscommunication occurred in which he thought that we had agreed to hire him, and he showed up the following Monday morning with his crew, even though as that time we didn't even have our blue prints ready.
If possible, find a good carpenter, and have him make you a good set of molds to make your own concrete hollow blocks. Most of the hollow blocks for sell over here are complete garbage, and in some cases, about fifty percent of the hollow blocks we received from supplier would fall apart in our hands when we tried to pick them up. Also, this gets back to making sure that you have someone who really knows how to mix concrete.
All in all, I think that our construction cost was just below $40,000 USD, and in the last few years I've spent a lot of money fixing mistakes here and there. But as our house sits today, I'm pretty much happy with it. Also, if you go with a simpler design, it will keep remedial repair costs down in the future.