A 6.0
The square dashboard: reading a house by the foot
Cost per square foot is the number everyone compares and almost nobody is given the means to compare correctly. This page takes the unit apart.
A square dashboard is the summary sheet at the front of a proposal that reduces a whole house to figures per square foot — one headline number, then the same number broken into the parts it is made of.
Every household building a house arrives at that figure, because it is the only unit that appears to make two different proposals comparable. It is genuinely useful for a first sanity check: it will tell you whether a plan sits anywhere near a budget before anyone spends money on drawings.
What it cannot do is choose a builder for you, and the reason is arithmetic rather than ethics. The figure is a fraction. Two builders can produce very different fractions for the same house without either of them being wrong, because they have used different denominators, included different scope in the numerator, and been handed different ground to build on. Reading it correctly means taking all three apart, which is what the rest of this page does.
River Rock Builders, LLC does not publish a figure on this site. Any number we could put here would be an average across houses and parcels that have nothing to do with yours, and quoting it would be exactly the mistake this page is describing.
The same 2,400 feet, three ways
- Left: heated and cooled area only, which is the most common basis
- Centre: the same house counted with garage and covered porches added
- Right: the same house again with an unfinished bonus space included
One house. Three defensible denominators. Three different figures, none of them dishonest and none of them comparable to each other.
B 2.0 · The denominator
Which feet are being counted
Start at the bottom of the fraction, because it is the easiest place for two figures to diverge and the least likely to be stated. Heated and cooled living area is the most widely used basis and the one appraisers work from. It is also the smallest of the plausible numbers, which means it produces the highest cost per foot.
Add a three-car garage and the denominator grows by several hundred feet of space that costs a fraction of what living area costs to build. The figure drops immediately, and the house has not changed at all. Add deep covered porches — which in this climate are not a luxury but a way of keeping afternoon sun off a west elevation — and it drops again. Include an unfinished bonus room over the garage and it drops further still.
None of that is deceptive on its own. It becomes deceptive when one proposal quietly uses total area under roof and another uses conditioned area, and the two figures are set side by side as though they measure the same thing. The fix is a single question, asked of every builder you are talking to: what area did you divide by. Any builder should be able to answer it immediately.
B 3.0 · The numerator
What is inside the number, and what has been left outside it
The top of the fraction is where most of the real difference lives, and it divides into two problems: scope that is excluded, and scope that is included at a number chosen to look attractive.
Exclusions are the honest version. A proposal may legitimately leave out the driveway beyond a stated length, landscaping, window coverings, a well or an on-site wastewater system, appliances, or the utility connection fees. Each of those is real money that you will spend, and a proposal that names its exclusions clearly is doing you a service even though its headline figure looks worse than one that stays vague.
Allowances are the harder problem, because they appear inside the number. An allowance is a placeholder for something not yet selected, and its size is a judgement call. A lighting allowance written without a fixture count, a flooring allowance that assumes a material nobody would actually choose, a cabinetry allowance drawn from a different price band than the kitchen in the rendering — each of those makes a proposal more competitive today and more expensive later, without a single dishonest sentence being written.
This is why we write a stated basis behind every allowance: the assumed quality and quantity behind the number. It makes the allowance checkable against what you actually want, and it makes our proposal comparable to somebody else's. If a competing proposal will not show you the basis of its allowances, the two headline figures are not measuring the same house, and no amount of arithmetic will make them.
B 4.0 · The parcel
The lot pushes the figure around, and it does not care about your floor plan
Site work, utilities and the foundation are costs that belong to the ground rather than to the house, but a per-square-foot figure spreads them across the floor area anyway. That is why the same set of drawings produces different figures on different parcels, and why a number quoted by a builder from a subdivision job is close to meaningless for a rural lot.
The items that move it most in central Arkansas are consistent. A long driveway on a slope with real drainage requirements. A well and an on-site wastewater system instead of municipal connections. Rock at footing depth on the ridges west of Little Rock or through Saline County. Expansive clay that requires an engineered foundation rather than a conventional one. Substantial cut and fill to get a level pad, with the compaction testing that goes with placing structural fill.
Any one of those can change the figure noticeably. Two or three together can change it enough to make a plan unaffordable on one parcel and comfortable on another a mile away. That is the entire argument for evaluating the lot before committing to a design, and it is set out in detail on the land and site development page and the foundations page.
B 5.0 · Using it well
What to line up when you have two proposals on the table
The useful comparison is never figure against figure. It is document against document, and it takes about twenty minutes with both proposals open.
Twenty minutes, six questions
- What area did each one divide by — conditioned, under roof, or something else?
- What does each explicitly exclude, and what will those excluded items cost you?
- Does each allowance state its basis, and does that basis match what you want?
- What does each assume about the parcel, and did either of them actually walk it?
- What foundation is each pricing, and what did that choice come from?
- What is the draw schedule tied to — finished stages, or dates?
If a proposal cannot answer four of these, its headline figure is not a price. It is an estimate of a house nobody has described yet.
B 6.0 · Underneath the figure
Three mechanisms that decide what the number does
The figure on the front page of a proposal is an output. These are the three documents that actually govern it over the course of a build — what it contains, when it is paid, and how it is permitted to move.
Allowances
What an allowance actually promisesWhat an allowance actually promises, and what it costs you when its basis is left unwritten.
Draw schedule
Paying for a house in stagesHow payments attach themselves to finished and inspected stages instead of to dates on a calendar.
Change orders
Nothing changes without a signed pageThe single mechanism by which anything is added, removed or altered once building has started.
Questions
Asked about the square dashboard
Broader questions about permits, draw schedules and timelines are answered on the questions page.
What is a square dashboard?
It is the one-page summary at the front of a proposal that reduces a whole house to figures per square foot: the total, and then the same total broken into the parts it is made of. It is useful for the reason any dashboard is useful — it puts several numbers where you can see them at once — and it is misleading for the same reason, because a single figure invites comparison with another single figure that may have been calculated from a completely different set of assumptions.
Which square feet are actually being counted?
That is the first question to ask and it is answered inconsistently across the industry. Heated and cooled living area is the most common basis. Some figures include a garage, some include covered porches, some include an unfinished bonus space above the garage, and some include all of it under the word "total". A house with a large garage and deep porches can carry two entirely different per-foot figures depending on which denominator was used, without anybody misrepresenting anything.
Why is a smaller house more expensive per square foot?
Because the expensive rooms do not shrink. Kitchens, bathrooms and mechanical spaces carry most of the cost per unit of floor area in any house, and a smaller plan has the same number of them spread across fewer feet. Bedrooms and living space are comparatively cheap per foot. The consequence is that shrinking a plan by fifteen per cent does not reduce the cost by fifteen per cent, and a per-foot figure taken from a larger house will understate a smaller one.
Does the lot change the figure?
Substantially, and this is the part that is hardest to see from a summary sheet. Site work, utilities and the foundation are a cost attached to the parcel rather than to the house, so they land on the same floor area regardless of what that parcel demanded. A house built on a level lot with a sewer main at the street and one built on a sloped rural parcel needing a long drive, an on-site wastewater system and a stepped foundation can be identical above the slab and carry very different per-foot figures.
Can I use a per-square-foot figure at all, then?
Yes, for what it is good at: a rough early sanity check on whether a plan is in the right region of a budget, and a way of testing consistency inside one proposal. It is not a tool for choosing between builders. For that, compare the documents underneath the figure — the specification, the allowance schedule and what the proposal says about the site — because that is where the actual difference between two numbers lives.
Bring us the proposal you already have
If you are holding a number from somebody else and cannot tell what is inside it, bring it to the consultation. We will read it with you and tell you what it does and does not cover, whether or not you end up building with us.
River Rock Builders, LLC · 2024 Arkansas Valley Dr, Little Rock, AR 72212