London Builder FAQs

This page answers 27 questions people ask about builders in London: what builders charge, how to find and vet a good one, the red flags that should end a conversation, how platforms like Checkatrade and MyBuilder actually work, and what building new costs. The answers come from running a building firm in South London since 2020, not from scraping other websites. We renovate, extend and convert houses across Crystal Palace, Dulwich, Lewisham, Bromley and the areas around them. Most of that work is Victorian terraces, Edwardian semis and 1930s houses, which colours what we say about cost and timescale. We are not new-build developers, and where a question is really about new builds, we say so.

One thing shapes every answer here: we do not price work over the phone. We survey the property first, then give a fixed written quote, and the price we quote is the price you pay. Any figure on this page is a floor, not a promise, until we have seen the job.

If you are comparing quotes right now, our guide to choosing a builder in London goes deeper, the free quote fairness scorer sanity-checks any quote in a minute, and the Home Renovation FAQs cover the projects themselves.