Design Builders stopped accepting checks years ago. As a leading design-build firm serving Montgomery County, MD and Fairfax County, VA, we've modernized our payment process to respect your time. Our 21st-century payment methods eliminate the hassle of writing checks, mailing payments, and tracking receipts—letting you focus on enjoying your new outdoor living space instead.
Paying Your Contractor by Check? Not in Maryland & Virginia
Whether you’re putting down a deposit or paying for the full project, when it comes time to pay your contractor, many still expect you to provide a physical check. Let’s just take a minute to think about that.
When paying with a check, you have to get out your checkbook (after finding it), write out all the relevant information, and carefully crease the check along the top so you can actually successfully tear along that perforated line—and that’s not even the time-consuming part yet. After you’ve written out the check, you then have to arrange for a time to physically meet your builder and hand off the check, or you have to make a dedicated trip to the post office.
This is a drain on your builder’s schedule as well. He or she has to drive to meet you somewhere in order to pick up the check, and then another trip to the bank or ATM is necessary to deposit those funds. It quickly becomes a lot of time and effort, and ultimately it’s disruptive to two people’s schedules.
Safety Concerns with Sending a Check
If you’re thinking you can save time by mailing a check rather than actually meeting your builder, you then have to contend with the safety concerns of putting a check in the mail. When it comes to home construction projects, checks can be for sizable amounts, and there’s an inherent risk by simply putting that envelope in your mailbox and hoping it arrives safely at its intended destination. Especially as computer encryption becomes more sophisticated and payments online become more and more secure, criminals are increasingly turning to check theft as an easier way to steal money.
CoConstruct: How Design Builders Simplifies Payments
At Design Builders, we operate within a secure digital app called CoConstruct, and it allows for payments directly in the system. You can set up a wire transfer, or you can pay with a credit card. In either case, the payment platform is open twenty-four hours a day (no need to work around the bank’s hours), and you can make any payment from the comfort of your home or anywhere that’s convenient for you.
Free Your Builder to Do What’s Important
Driving to different locations is often a significant time commitment, and every minute your builder is driving is a minute he or she isn’t managing your project. By taking advantage of twenty-first-century payment options, you free up your builder’s time to do what he or she does best—create and manage your home construction project.
Enjoy Payment Options
In terms of payment options, the most important factor is that your design and build firm is flexible and responds to your needs. If you prefer sending checks and your design and build firm onlyaccepts online payments, that can be as much of an inconvenience as wanting to pay online and finding you have to use a check. Working with the right company is about options, flexibility, and customer-centric policies.
An Important Update to the Design Builders Payment Policy
Starting immediately, Design Builders is now waiving the 3 percent credit card fee when paying through CoConstruct. From now until December 31, 2020, all Design Builders customers can pay with a credit card for no additional service charge fee.
It’s just one way we are looking to make the process of designing and building a new home project all the easier for our customers.
If you have any questions about our payment procedure or this new policy, feel free to reach out today!
