- Resolve the block before the customer sits down — never type the address for the first time in front of them.
- Walk the five steps in order. Skipping ahead to price is how deals stall.
- Say the live number out loud early — a moving price you explain beats a fixed price they doubt.
- The appointment isn't over until the proposal PDF is in their inbox.
Why the first appointment decides the deal
Most builders treat the first appointment as a meet-and-greet: collect the block details, promise a siting, quote “in a few days.” That gap is where deals die. The customer leaves excited, the excitement decays, and by the time your quote lands they’ve had two more appointments — one of them with a builder who answered everything in the room.
The playbook below assumes one thing: every question gets answered while the customer is still at the table. Does it fit? What does the sun do in July? What does it cost with the alfresco? If the answer is “let me get back to you,” you’ve booked a second appointment you may never get.
Before they arrive: resolve the block
Ten minutes of prep buys you the strongest opening in the industry: greeting the customer with their own block already on screen. Type the address the day before and let Cadastral pull the parcel, zone, overlays, easements and trees. Then read what it found:
- Zone and schedule — GRZ2 behaves differently from NRZ1. Know which one you’re in before you promise a footprint.
- Easements — a 2 m sewer easement at the rear quietly deletes the alfresco. Better you say it than the drafter three weeks later.
- Trees — a protected canopy next door reaches into the buildable area. Cadastral draws the TPZ; look at it.
- Near misses — check which designs in your catalogue fit and which miss by 200 mm. The near-miss shelf is tomorrow’s talking point.
”This is your lot on Bayview Parade — 448 square metres, and here’s everything the council says about it” is the strongest first sentence a consultant can say.
Walk the spine, in order
Every good appointment walks the same five steps. The order matters: each step earns the trust the next one spends. Customers who’ve seen the rules checked live don’t argue with the price at the end — they watched it being built.
Recap what you found in prep. Let them correct you — “actually we’re knocking down, not vacant” changes everything and costs nothing now.
BLOCK · 2 MINUTES · SETS THE FRAMEShow designs that fit this block first, near misses second. A size is part of the choice: Wexley 24 vs 26 is a trade they can see, not a form field.
HOME · 10 MINUTES · THEIR HANDS ON THE CHIPSDrag the home. Let a check fail on purpose, then apply the one-tap fix — watching a rule break and heal is what makes “all clear” believable.
SITING · 5 MINUTES · TRUST IS BUILT HEREScrub to June 21, 3 pm. Show the shadow, the neighbour, the light in the living room. This is the step nobody else does — see the sun conversation below.
SUN · 5 MINUTES · THE DIFFERENTIATORFlip to presentation mode, walk the priced proposal top to bottom, send the PDF while they watch. Book the follow-up before they stand up.
PRESENT · 8 MINUTES · CLOSE THE LOOPThe number only lands after they’ve watched it assemble — base, façade, options, site costs. Quoted cold, the same figure reads as “expensive.” Built live, it reads as “honest.”
Say the number early — and out loud
The live price sits in the top bar from the moment a design is selected. Use it. Every time something changes — a size, a façade, the alfresco — say the new number out loud: “that takes us to 486,200.” It feels counterintuitive; consultants are trained to protect the number until the end. But a price the customer watched move is a price they understand, and a price they understand is a price they’ll defend to their partner that evening.
”A moving price you explain beats a fixed price they doubt.”
— The whole argument, in one line
Site costs are the trust test. They’re on the block from step one — the fall of the land, the soil, the easement crossing — so surface them as line items the customer can point at, not a provisional sum buried on page nine. Nothing in the appointment should appear for the first time in the contract.
The sun conversation nobody else has
No customer walks in asking for a shadow diagram. But every customer has stood in a dark winter kitchen and hated it. The sun study is where the appointment stops being a transaction and becomes advice — you’re showing them the July afternoon in a home that doesn’t exist yet.
Keep it to three questions, in their words: where do shadows fall across the day, do we overshadow the neighbour, and how much light lands in the living room in winter. Scrub slowly. Let them ask for a different month. If a north-facing living room means flipping the plan, this is the cheapest moment that flip will ever have.
Worth keeping straight in your own head, because customers conflate them: the day that matters to them is 21 June, when the light is worst. The day that matters to the council is 22 September — the Victorian overshadowing standards test five hours of sun to a neighbour’s secluded open space between 9 am and 3 pm on the September equinox, not at the solstice. Show them June because it answers the worry. Cite September when the question is compliance.
Send it before the car park
The proposal PDF is the whole appointment, compressed: the block, the sited plan, the compliance verdicts with their clauses, the sun summary, and the priced line items — one number, the same number they watched all hour. Send it from presentation mode while they’re still seated, then say what happens next and when.
- Do send before they leave — the email arriving mid-goodbye is the close.
- Do save the session and name the version (“Wexley 26 · Halden · alfresco”) so the follow-up starts where this ended.
- Don’t promise a “tidied up” version later. The proposal is already tidy; a second version teaches them to wait.
All six sections on one page — timings, the three sun questions, and the send-before-the-car-park checklist.
In the works