New Customer Walk-through

” The very first thing we do for new projects is what we call project assessment. I will ask them what’s the address of the property, or if it doesn’t have an address, what’s the tax map key number and we look it up. Then we find out what the zoning is and then we find out what the setbacks are and the allowable uses because this is a big deal. How many houses are you allowed to have on the property. Typically, properties are allowed to have a main house and an Ohana, or cottage as it’s known more commonly, but here in Hawaii we call them Ohanas. Ohanas are highly regulated in terms of their size, how big they can be, how much of a covered lanai can they have or a deck or these things, or the number of them that’s allowed on the property. We will do all of that assessment from the very first conversation.

Then we also try to get a very good idea about what the customer wants. We will get all of that information absolutely free so that we incorporate it into our proposals for them. Usually, we give them so much information they just think about it for a while and then they come back to us when they’ve made up their mind. We like to get information. If you’re a new customer, if you have a site plan of the property or survey or anything, we basically want a copy of it. If there are existing buildings on the property and you have plans for them, we want copies of those too. We really want to get as much as we can that’s available for any particular job because the more we get hold of, the less we have to do, the more the customer saves money.”