Building Permit Guide: How to Get Your New Home Plans Approved the First Time

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Show Notes: If the idea of dealing with building departments and permits feels intimidating, this episode breaks down how to get from “no idea where to start” to “permit‑ready, buildable plans” without losing months in confusion. You will learn why zoning, building, planning, water, sewer, and other departments often don’t communicate well, how vague answers like “just send plans” can derail an owner‑builder, and how Landmark steps in to interpret requirements, coordinate architectural and structural design, and produce unified plan sets that both satisfy local codes and are actually practical to build from. You’ll learn the difference between architectural vs. structural plans, why “pretty” 3D drawings aren’t the same as real buildable plans, how mismatched drawings, missing energy or green code details, and on‑site “we’ll figure it out later” decisions destroy schedules and budgets, and why doing the homework up front — with permit‑ready, inspector‑friendly plans — is the fastest, least stressful way to get your new home approved and built.

Transcript:

Steve Tuma: I would say don’t let the unknown of the building department be a big hurdle. Let us help. We speak their language so we can help understand what needs to be done.

Interviewer: Greetings everyone, and welcome to Episode 74 of the Panelized Prefab Kit Home Building Show.

With me today, as usual, is the President and Founder of Landmark Home and Land Company, a company which has been helping people build their new homes where they want, exactly as they want, nationwide and around the globe since 1993, Mr. Steve Tuma.

Steve, how are you, buddy?

Steve Tuma: I’m doing well. It’s been a great week, and a lot of people are doing interesting house projects — some of the Los Angeles fire homes, some people building vacation homes, retirement homes, or family get‑together homes. So it’s been an interesting week, and next week will probably be just as interesting. Looking forward to it.

Interviewer: That’s good — something to look forward to.

Today I thought we’d go over some of the finer points of permitting a new building. I’m sure you’ve found that people don’t always have a complete understanding of the terminology — like what plan sets are — or even sometimes they may be intimidated by the permitting process altogether.

Would you mind spending some time going through that and perhaps making it a bit less scary for people?

Steve Tuma: Yeah, well I understand people’s perspective on permitting, because we had an interesting thing happen just this week. A customer is building a house in the Carolinas. We call the city, we call the building department, check out their website — they don’t know what it takes to issue a permit.

They said, “Well, call and talk to the plan checkers.”

We call the plan checker. Plan checker says, “I don’t know, just send me plans.”

We talked to the inspectors. They don’t have a written process of what it is with plans.

So that could lead people to say, “Well, how do I know I’m doing it right?”

My kind of funny, off‑the‑wall question is: then how do you know what you’re checking if you don’t have a list of what’s important for that building department?

So sometimes when you call building departments, they don’t always communicate well. Their information may not be updated on the websites. Or what I’ve run into — other things — sometimes people will call a zoning department and say, “Hey, can I build a house here?” They’ll be like, “Yeah, as long as it meets these setbacks and height requirements, you can build it.”

And people interpret that as a uniform “yes,” that you can build. They don’t realize that maybe you’ve also got to talk to the water department, the sewage department, electrical people, planning department, and potentially other departments.

So what we can do is help people guide through that process for their individual building department. Because there are some building departments that literally don’t exist — you can just go and dig a hole and build a house. Others are very simple, in that they just say, “Get me plans,” without any details. Others give you kind of a list that might be accurate, but it might not have been updated, or there are other departments. And then there’s other building departments that are extremely detailed.

So I understand why people can be confused — you don’t know which one is yours.

So I would say: if people have the building department information, it’s great. If it’s something where they don’t think they’re getting a clear picture, let us know and we’ll help them through the process to go through and get it.

Because these departments — even though you think they work with each other every day — they don’t always communicate, and they don’t always give complete answers. So when a person goes to a zoning department and says, “Hey, what do I need for a building permit?” They’ll be like, “I don’t know, I’m zoning.” So they don’t necessarily say, “Hey, you’ve got to go to these other departments or get these other things taken care of.”

Now, we’ve got a lot of experience, so we can help people understand what might be there, and we can help get through the system — look at web pages, call building departments, do different things to get details together.

Overall, people have a general understanding, because customers in general are thinking about building, so they’re doing a little research. But I would say: don’t let the unknown of the building department be a big hurdle. Let us help. We’ll help navigate through it, find out what’s there. We speak their language, in a sense, so we can also help understand what needs to be done.

Sometimes they’ll say certain things like, “Hey, you need this,” but it’s really a follow‑up question. So that’s the thing that I think people need to understand. It’s just — if they haven’t done it, or they’ve only done it once or twice or in a different jurisdiction, there might be different concerns.

And then, you know, if you’re in a more sophisticated building department or in an area with different conditions, they might say, “Hey, you need a geotechnical report, you need a geological report, you need a topographical survey.” Sometimes people just don’t know what it is. But we can add clarity to it, to help them understand how it applies to their specific project. And that’s the important thing.

So none of it’s hard — at least for us, because we’ve done it so long. But none of it’s hard — it’s just a matter of understanding what it is.

So those are the things that we can do. We’re here to help people understand their project, guide them through it, and get the answers so that it’s a smooth build and a good set of plans.

And like I say, we’ve worked all over the country, so we’ve seen pretty much everything. Every once in a while the building department comes up with a curveball, but so far every single customer’s gotten a permit, and we intend to keep it that way. We just have the understanding of how to navigate building permits for single‑family homes, duplexes, multifamily, ADUs — whatever it may be.

Interviewer: So you guys are creating house plans that, pretty much as much as possible, are permit‑roadblock‑free?

Steve Tuma: Yeah — well, they’re permit‑ready because we go through and find out what the building department wants. And we actually go another step.

Some people believe you do permit‑ready plans, and other people say you do that and then you have a separate set of building plans. I just don’t quite understand why you would have two — other than the perception that you’re getting a permit quicker, but you’re really delaying the build later.

We do it just to make sure all the information is right, because it’s amazing how one little thing can be a domino effect through the rest of the project.

So we want to know that we understand:

• The ground conditions
• The slope of the ground
• What are the situations with their water supply
• The septic
• The electric
• Any wetlands areas
• Any other situations which may come to life

And then also zoning things:

• Setbacks
• How tall the house can be
• Are there restrictions on where windows can be as far as seeing into neighbors’ houses
• And other details

So we spend a lot of time looking at that.

And some of the different areas in the country that have more sophisticated building departments or more detailed zoning laws, I’ll call them — we have to do a lot of work on the site plan to make sure that everything fits, cut sections of the house, cut sections of the house through the land, make sure that the slope is right, so we’re fully set and ready to go.

I don’t want to scare people when we talk about this, but it’s what we do every day, so it’s not a big deal for us to go through. But we want permit‑ready house plans.

So we’ll go through, develop the set of plans that are permit‑ready. This includes:

• Architectural design
• Structural design
• Stamped engineering, if required
• Energy codes
• Green codes, if they’re required
• Zoning things
• HOAs
• Historic committees

Different things like that. And they vary by building site.

And we want to have a complete set of plans that, once approved, is also used for the actual building phases. The reason being is you want the building department to look at it, and you build off of that, instead of: get a permit and then do a bunch of changes that the building department may or may not agree with.

So that’s why it’s good to have the best information up front, so that you’ve got an accurate set of plans.

And people don’t always understand how an energy code can affect the structure of your home. We do.

And sometimes people say, “Well, this guy did this, and this guy did that.” It’s like, yeah, but did it blend together to make a uniform, buildable set of plans? So you’re not doing a lot of changes on site, because those changes on site invariably cost a lot more. They create a problem, a delay in your schedule, and it’s just stressful.

So why not do the homework up front to avoid those problems? And that’s the way we look at it. We look at a complete overview of the project.

Interviewer: And you don’t want to be setting up red flags for a zoning commission or a building commission.

Steve Tuma: Right. And you know what’s funny about it is, I hear people say, “Oh, this building department, they’re tough, they’re tough.”

Sometimes it’s, “Yeah, you turned garbage in and they’re telling you to do it right.”

In all the projects we’ve done in 32 years, I would say I can run into a handful of building departments that were just hard to work with, because of what I’ll call an attitude problem or a bureaucratic issue on their side.

There are some that are tough because they’re asking for extreme things that other places don’t… but there must be some reason why.

Now, I’ll agree — of all the building departments in the country, why do one or two ask for extremely weird things that no one else asks for? I have no idea. But the thing is, we’ve gotten through every single one so far. And invariably, when you look back, it’s just a learning experience that it goes through.

So we have been able to get through every single building department that a customer has requested to work with — whether it’s a simple one or whether it’s super sophisticated.

And sometimes the simple ones — sometimes they have their own challenges, because sometimes you have people in building departments that may not understand their job. I’m not here to pick a fight or create something, but sometimes you have people reviewing structural plans that don’t have the knowledge for structural plans.

But if that’s the case, and they choose to question it, we have the people with all the answers to make sure that what we supply for permits, we’re 100% confident in them.

Interviewer: Yeah. Well, people think any governmental entity is going to be a little scary, but building commissions are really there to help — even though sometimes people can say, “Wow, they’re really going overboard on this or that,” but mostly they’re there to help, I would think.

Steve Tuma: And in general, a lot of them are called Building and Safety. So there are different situations which come up where they want to make sure it’s built right structurally so it stands up, but a lot of the codes are safety issues.

We could all go on YouTube and watch funny videos of people doing stupid things. To them it may not have seemed stupid, but it’s one of these things that — a lot of it, and a lot of it’s for common sense.

I had someone saying, “Hey, I’m a skinny guy. Why do I need a three‑foot‑wide hallway?” And it was kind of funny, because at first I thought he was being funny about it, and it was kind of funny — but it was literally his understanding, like, “Why do I need it?”

It’s like, well, so you can get out in an emergency, walk a mattress down to your bedroom, different things like that.

Sometimes people don’t understand railings. And I also agree — sometimes there are codes, no matter how much you scratch your head, you just don’t understand.

Interviewer: Yeah.

Steve Tuma: But the reality of it is, there’s always ways to work through it, make it work, keep the architectural features of the home, keep what you like of the home, and make it a buildable home.

Interviewer: Right. So let’s get back to just what I would call maybe a lack of lingo on new builders. They just don’t have the — “What do words mean?” — or “What does this mean?” Even when they go on the website.

What’s the difference between — and I see this on the website a lot — architectural versus structural plans? Can you kind of go through that for us?

Steve Tuma: Well, it is interesting because some building departments think that they’re interchangeable. We had one building department that actually approved permits off of structural plans without any architectural details, and I’m like, “How did they do this?”

So it can be confusing, but basically, in simple terms, the way I think of it:

• Architectural plans show the design and style of the home — they show the roof pitch, how tall the walls are, where the windows are, what the floor plan is like, where the garage is, how the kitchen is laid out, how thick the floors are, how thick the roof is, what type of foundation — is it a basement, a crawl space, a piling system, a slab, a monolithic slab, a stem‑wall slab — all these different details. So they show what the house looks like.
• Structural plans are what holds the house up.

Now, some of this can overlap. Let’s just take a wall for example. A two‑by‑six wall on the exterior wall is generally structural — it holds up the house — but it will probably also be on the architectural plan, saying, “Hey, these are two‑by‑six walls.” So it’s a feature of the home, but the structure of how those studs are put together, how they’re held, how they’re nailed, how the sheathing works — that’s part of the structural plan.

So the structural plan will include more details as far as:

• What the floor joists are like — are they two‑by‑tens, two‑by‑twelves, I‑joists, floor trusses?
• How far apart are they?
• The specific details of those
• The type of sheathing
• The size of the beams
• The type of beam — is it dimensional wood, is it LVL, is it glulam, is it steel?

Different things like that.

And the structural plans also show how things are connected:

• How the foundation is designed
• How the foundation is connected to the floor system
• How the floor system is connected to the walls
• How the walls are connected to the roof system

So the structure, in a sense if someone wants to look at it, gives details on how the house stands up. The architectural shows what the house looks like and then the features.

Now, sometimes things can overlap a little. I’ve seen some building departments that don’t want structural plans — they don’t request it — but on an architectural plan you would put, “Hey, these are two‑by‑ten floors,” or, “Hey, a beam is made out of a double 11‑7/8 LVL.” So they can overlap, which is why people get a little bit confused.

But, if you’re building in certain areas, in a simpler home, they may not ask for engineer‑stamped structural plans. They may just ask for details like beam sizes, beam sizes of the headers over windows, or around porches, or things like that.

Other places — more sophisticated building departments, you get into most of Colorado, California, most of Arizona, Washington State, parts of Illinois, Florida — they’ll want the architectural and the structural plans.

And here’s the interesting thing — not trying to add to confusion: you need to make sure they match.

We’ve got sets of plans that outside designers have put together, outside engineers have put together, that building departments have approved, where they don’t match. And people are like, “How can this happen? They gave me a permit.”

I’m like, well, they might have checked what’s important to them, but they’re not guarantors that your house is going to get built.

So that’s why we have this unified set of plans where everything matches:

• The energy codes
• The structural engineering
• The architectural designs
• Different details on the grade of the land
• Green codes
• Details like that

It’s a lot of work tying those loose ends together, and that’s why our permit‑ready set of plans are ready to build off of. It saves a lot of time and headache and backpedaling.

And what people don’t always understand is, with our system we give a guaranteed price. So we’ll go through, work through the building department details as part of it. It’s not like some other services where people are going to charge you by the hour and just rack up the bill saying, “Oh, I didn’t expect your building department to want energy codes — that’s an additional cost.”

Well, it’s kind of a funny process. We do a one‑stop shop, make it easy, just take care of the customer, get it done.

Interviewer: Yeah, and have a little fun along the way. Or a lot of fun.

The one‑stop shop thing — every time we get on one of these podcasts, there are so many different ways that Landmark Home and Land Company seems to be able to help its customer from every angle. And that one‑stop shop is actually a pretty good way to describe what you guys do over there.

Steve Tuma: Well, what’s interesting about it is when people initially inquire to us, they probably find us — well, if it’s through a friend or relative or someone that recommended us, they have a pretty strong or a better understanding of what we do.

But when people first come to us, they might search “panelized homes” or “Landmark Home and Land panelized homes” or whatever to find us. And they don’t realize that they really need help in the whole permitting — matching everything up, making sure the house can get built well — and also have a real resource, with a real human — me and other people on our team — that can look at their project.

So if they have a question, we can respond to the question in relation to their exact project. So it’s not something like, “Well, in general…” No — it’s like, “Hey, let’s look at your site plan, let’s look at the house, let’s look at your conditions, and let’s get you the accurate answer for your site.”

And what’s interesting with a lot of our customer base — a lot of them will say, “Steve, I came to you for the panelization. The support and help and knowledge that Landmark Home and Land Company supplies is actually more important.”

Getting through the nuances of the building department, understanding contractors, understanding how you take incomplete answers from other sources and put it together to make it a buildable home — that’s the important part of it.

And that’s the thing that people don’t always understand.

You know, I could relate it to restaurants: if you just want a quick burger, go to a drive‑thru. If you want an experience, maybe you need to go to a place with better service, music, a view — so you could say, “Hey, both of them serve hamburgers, but what gives me the experience of enjoying the meal?”

So we kind of look at it as a complete, overall situation, where: let’s help the customer through the process of building the home, not just, “Here’s a stack of wood — good luck putting it together.”

Interviewer: Yeah. Well, again, back to the one‑stop shop — Landmark’s going to know what’s needed to get a building permit in very little time, whereas the customer himself may take weeks just to figure out what he even needs to do to get a building permit.

Steve Tuma: Oh, some of the stuff’s interesting, because these building departments aren’t always the best at communication. They’re not always the best at responding. So someone that doesn’t understand it can spend weeks trying to get a simple answer, where we’ve gone through the process.

And in general, our plans typically exceed what most building departments want. We’ve worked in some areas with extremely stringent situations, and so we’re kind of already up for it. It’s our game. It’s what we do. So we just really enjoy doing it.

Interviewer: Let’s go back to inspectors and the building departments in general. In your experience, what generally are inspectors looking for before you get started with your home build?

Steve Tuma: Well, that’s an interesting question, because inspectors might be looking for different things within the same building department.

I’ve gone to see that in some building departments, someone will say, “Oh, I can’t get this inspector. I’ve got to make sure I get that inspector.” I’m like, we’re going to do plans to make sure any inspector will have the answers — first of all on the plan check, but then also on the actual inspection at the construction site.

And that may be two different people with two totally different outlooks. And what people don’t understand is, even if they approve the plans, the inspector on site may have a different opinion — for who knows what reason.

So what I have seen is that inspectors are looking, in general, for certain situations. Some people — I’ve had some inspectors where the customers told me that they drove by at 10 miles an hour and then they texted them that the house is okay. But other inspectors go through and check every single detail.

We do a great job on our plans, which allows our customer to build it right on site. So it’s kind of hard to say that each inspector looks for “this.”

If you’re in areas with simpler building departments, they probably have a different eye than if you’re in the middle of South Florida, in Miami, in a hurricane zone, where they’re going to have more of a structural concern.

But a lot of them are looking for the basic safety things:

• Hallway width
• Door sizes
• Egress
• Smoke detectors
• CO detectors

Just overall general things — make sure things are nailed together right, make sure the rebar in the foundation is right. I think those items are the general things they look at. But what each individual looks at is up to them.

What’s really cool about this is: through our processes, our customers learn and understand the design and what’s being done. So when they’re out there working with the contractors, or doing the work themselves, they’ve already previewed it in their mind. They understand what needs to happen.

So it’s extremely rare — like very rare — that I get a call where someone says, “Hey, the inspector’s questioning this.” Now maybe they’re questioning the way it was installed, but it’s extremely rare that they’re questioning what we have done, because we’ve done a good job at making sure that our plans are done.

We want to spend the time, make sure that the plans are done right, to make sure that the building and inspection process goes smoothly, instead of creating problems. And the best way to do that is have it on a very clear set of plans, where:

• The building department knows
• We know
• Our customer knows
• And the contractors that are involved know

And it’s very clear, so there aren’t little hiccups or “miscommunications” or other things that go on.

So we go to great effort to make sure everything lines up and kind of preview it, to work through it. That is actually the most important part of this process, and I don’t think that everyone always understands the value of:

• Doing the homework up front
• Getting the plans done right
• Having a clear and accurate set of plans

So that everyone understands what’s going on.

It takes a little bit of extra time, but it’s — what do they say? — an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. That type of situation. And that’s our attitude. It just makes it more enjoyable for everyone.

It’s just cool to get a picture from someone and they go, “Steve, we passed inspection. Look at this house — my dog even likes it.” You know, dogs running around, or the family’s out there enjoying the view.

Interviewer: What are some of the common reasons that plan sets or permits get rejected in general? Do you find that there are common reasons why these rejections happen?

Steve Tuma: In our case, we always go through and look at the exact list — whether your building department has a checklist. We go through to make sure that each of those items is specifically and completely answered.

We’re in the business of helping people get a good set of plans. We’re not in the business of trickling things out and saying, “Oh, that costs more, that costs more — I didn’t know they needed to know where your light switch was, it costs more.”

So we’re not in the thing of nickel‑and‑diming. We’re in the business of getting it taken care of.

So, in our case, when something comes back — like a lot of jurisdictions, like in California, it’s just normal, no matter what you do, to have at least one plan check. We have had plans go through in California and other places the first time through, and people commend us for it. It’s pretty rare — it happens, but we do.

So typically what I’ve seen in a case like that — it’s not necessarily a rejection, it’s just part of a clarification, where they will ask for something on the plan checklist, we supply it, but they need a further thought into it. Different situations.

And you can end up in a scenario where the inspector is personally doing things — especially with these third‑party inspectors, where they think they need to add to the list. And sometimes there is something that, until you have the complete plan set, you don’t see the complete situation that is there.

We had a really, really funny one. I like to look at this as we’re doing a great job helping people, but also keeping it light.

We were in an extremely picky building department in Northern California, around San Francisco, and they wanted a peephole in the front door. I’m like, “Okay.” So we’ll specifically note a peephole there. We specifically note the peephole. They later come back to say, “Well, for ADA compliance, we need a peephole for someone in a wheelchair.”

I’m like, “Okay — never had that request. Totally easy to put a peephole at a certain height for the wheelchair.”

They then come back and tell us that we need to specify the peephole size and the view through the peephole. So I’m like, “Okay, so what are we going to do, sit back and forth?” And each one of these plan checks took that building department one month to go through, and we’re dealing with a peephole — relatively small.

But I understand their concern. We’re not here to argue with them, we’re here to work with it.

So I figured, instead of getting into a back‑and‑forth and whatever the technical parts of peepholes — what they look at, what the view was on the opposite side, can people look in for safety, and all these other things — what I just told them is, I said, “We changed the door to a glass door. So if it’s a small person in a small wheelchair, if it’s a tall person — everything was there.” So we changed the front door to a glass door, which in my opinion is the biggest peephole. It’s a complete glass door.

They then came back and asked me why we didn’t have a peephole in the door. And I had to explain to them that it was a glass door — was it really necessary to put a peephole in a glass door when you could see through it? And then they went through.

So now, that is very extreme. It’s almost funny — it’s one of the better stories that I have. But it is the nature of sometimes you end up in these weird things.

Now, I don’t want to scare people by this. This will probably never happen again. It just more shows that we have the attitude to get through it, solve the problem, and keep the process going. And that’s what it is.

We didn’t charge extra for the back‑and‑forth. It was part of our job. It’s a great little story now.

So all those experiences over almost 33 years are what allow us to have the complete set of plans and details of what building departments want.

So when you say, “What gets rejected?” — in a sense it’s usually quirky little questions that come up later, or deeper thoughts that an individual plan checker may choose to think are important for a site.

Every plan checker is different. We have actually done, in certain jurisdictions, two extremely similar houses on the same lot, going through the same plan checker, and we had completely different checklist items — where they should have been uniform, but they were different.

So it’s just part of it. And that’s why we help people. That’s why we give a set price, so that people don’t get add‑ons and add‑ons that kill their budget. We just give them a set price to get them a set of plans for the permits.

Interviewer: That actually cleared things up pretty well.

Steve Tuma: I hope it didn’t get too deep.

Interviewer: No, because it can.

Steve Tuma: The bottom line is, we’ll get through it. If you’re in one of those jurisdictions where they just throw curveballs and curveballs and more curveballs, that’s probably 3–5% of the American building departments. The rest — 70–80% of them — are regular, just people looking at plans, passing them through. And then the balance are — they have little details here and there, but they’re not necessarily out to get you. They’re just there to show that they’re doing their job.

Interviewer: Let’s talk about — let’s go back to the terminology thing again. I’ve heard you talk, and I’ve read a bit about “pretty plans” and why they aren’t equal to buildable plans. What’s the difference?

Steve Tuma: You know what’s funny is, we’re getting a lot of people that show up with plans where someone drew something up. Some of these software programs are great at doing 3D visuals, putting shading at the right place. You can say, “Hey, this is what it looks like at sunset in November,” and all these things — and they look good.

But if you look at the details — the structural, the energy codes, the architecture — they’re not there. So it’s like the pretty little picture to look at, but the substance of the building project isn’t.

And more and more people have these plans — whether they drew it up themselves and think that they’re buildable, or they paid the local person in town. They come up with these pretty plans, but the details aren’t there.

So just because they look cute, and there’s great shadows and your Ferrari’s parked in the garage, it doesn’t mean that the substance is there for the house. And we’re seeing more and more of that.

I think what’s interesting is some of these software programs are getting easier for people to purchase or do online, or the local guy puts something together. But they don’t have the substance to really build a house properly, get through building departments, make sure the construction is easy, and go through.

And I think part of it is some of those programs are so complex that you have to be a true pro to understand it.

Just because an architect gave you plans — just because you gave them a lot of money — doesn’t mean the house is buildable. I know people aren’t going to believe that, but it happens every day.

Interviewer: Is AI coming into design a lot, and are you guys running into it?

Steve Tuma: You know, it’s coming in with renderings and walkthroughs, where people will say, “Oh, I have this picture, I sketched this picture up,” and they do it — but that’s more like a hobby thing.

In our case, I don’t think AI is there for the actual design concept.

Interviewer: You don’t think anybody’s going, “AI, design me a house”?

Steve Tuma: Oh yeah, that’ll happen. That’s someone dreaming, going, “Hey, let’s get ideas together.” So yeah, I’ve had people go through and say, “Hey, I want a beautiful house on a farm with a cow in front of it and a pond and a gravel driveway.” They’ll do that to kind of entertain or give us a concept.

And that’s really cool, because not everyone can draw that up. But the actual process of formalizing:

• Architectural plans
• Structural plans
• Energy codes
• Green codes

Tying this all together, so there’s this magic button on a computer that just does it — I haven’t even heard about it.

There might be parts that are there, but a lot of these little details — when you have to take all these ideas of, “Hey, why does a beam have to be this size?” “How does it fit in there?” “Does it affect the architectural design or the customer’s desires?” — I haven’t seen AI. I haven’t even heard about it.

I think there’s just too much going on. I have talked to people about it to see if there’s some advantage, but at this point it’s still great computer processes with people that understand architecture and structural design running them.

Like I mentioned in the “pretty pictures,” there’s a lot of people that can draw pretty pictures. The idea is: make sure the house is the way the customer wants it, it’s solid, it can be built, it can be inspected, it can be passed. And that’s a whole different level of detail.

We’ve actually gotten plans where dimensions aren’t on there. We don’t know how tall a ceiling is, we don’t know how long a house is. It sounds crazy, but it happens.

So that’s why we have our design team — so we can control and understand what’s going on. Design is extremely important to permitting, building, inspections, and enjoying the home.

Interviewer: Sure. So what does it mean when — I mean, it sounds like a slogan, but it really isn’t, it’s really true with you guys — but with Landmark, it seems like your designs and the way you guys design houses, they’re designed for approval.

I mean, you guys don’t want a bunch of roadblocks put in the way by building departments and stuff. It seems like you go out of your way to make sure that the plans from the outset are ready to be approved.

Steve Tuma: Yeah, that’s exactly what we’ve been talking about. It’s not just approval — it’s also for building.

The reason why is, we’re doing a panelized home package. We need all the details on a plan to make sure the house can actually get built the way that a customer wants it, and all those details are there.

A lot of people will draw plans up and say, “Oh, they’ll figure it out on site.” I’m like, they will maybe, but will it be what you want, and how much does it cost?

And that’s the thing — we give a guaranteed price. So ours aren’t just the permit approval — it’s there to make sure that the people involved with building have all the information.

When I hear people say, “Oh, we’ll figure it out on site,” what I hear is, “You killed your schedule, you killed your budget.” They think it’s — what they’re really doing is not wanting to make a decision. Well, the problem’s just going to be worse. You’re going to be half built and then have to find a problem, and then you might have to backpedal.

How about just take the time now and solve it?  What I find is generally those people don’t understand the overall project. They’re trying to get through a problem. Well, sometimes if you get rid of a problem now, it’s twice as big tomorrow.

Interviewer: Do it right the first time.

Steve Tuma: Isn’t that a simple idea? That’s what we do. Do it right the first time. Take the time. It’s not a race. We want to keep to a schedule, but it’s not a race.

This isn’t a race so that you can go to the bowling alley and say, “Guys, I got my plans in 28 minutes.” The idea is to make sure it’s built right.

Because it’s not just permitting we’re involved with. We want to make sure the customer’s budget can work the way they want it. We want to make sure their schedule works. And we want to keep it as enjoyable as possible. Changes on site can be a headache.  So — pre‑plan.

Interviewer:  Well, that’s going to wrap it up for today’s edition of the Panelized Prefab Kit Home Building Show. Steve, another very informative podcast — I want to thank you for that.

But before we let you go, let the listeners know how to find out more about Landmark Home and Land Company.

Steve Tuma: I think the best thing to do is check out our website at LHLC.com. It’s kind of like the initials of Landmark Home Land Company, but LHLC.com.

These podcasts are on there, videos are on there, discussions of what we do are there, pictures of projects. It kind of gives an understanding.

And what people can do is send us an email through there. They can look at different plans — we have thousands of plans. They can send an inquiry through the plans, or they could also give a call.

Mike will answer the phone at 800‑830‑9788, and that’s a great place to start. You can look at it at your convenience on the phone or on your computer, and then get some ideas, and then get in touch with us. We’ll work with you specifically on your project.

It goes beyond just saying, “Hey, here’s a bunch of panels.” It’s, “Hey, let’s plan your project. Let’s make sure that we get the best set of plans. You understand your project so that you’ve got an effective and enjoyable building process.”

Interviewer: Well, there you have it. Thank you again, Steve, and thanks to all of you for listening to the Panelized Prefab Kit Home Building Show.

So for Landmark Home and Land Company President Steve Tuma and myself, have a great week ahead, and we will see you next time.

Thanks, Steve.

Steve Tuma: Yeah, thank you. This was interesting. It was a good one — a different angle. I hope people enjoy it.