People searching for the person behind Wong Lye should find a straight answer, so here it is.

Who runs Wong Lye

I'm Larry Hoo. I'm the Director of Wong Lye Pte Ltd, and I'm the only one. There is no board to hide behind and no account manager between you and the person responsible for your project. If something goes wrong on your job, it is my problem.

I'm the builder, not the engineer

This distinction matters, and plenty of firms blur it, so I'd rather be plain about it.

I am not a structural engineer. I don't sign off structural drawings and I don't pretend to. We have an Architect and a Qualified Person who handle design and certification, and they are the ones whose names go on the submissions.

What I bring is the building itself. I have done this work with my own hands. When I walk your property and tell you what a job actually needs — what the existing structure will take, what will be awkward, what the drawings don't show — that comes from having built it before, not from reading it off a specification.

What that means for your project

Three things follow from a builder running the company rather than a salesperson.

You get told no. If your idea won't get approved, or the soil report says don't, you hear it from me before you spend money on it. We have walked away from jobs for that reason.

The quote is built, not guessed. We check URA controls and the existing structure before giving you numbers. An accurate quote takes about a week. A same-day quote is a guess with a decimal point on it.

You carry less risk than we do. We take a 5 to 10 percent deposit and bill the rest against completed milestones. If you are unhappy partway through, you can stop and pay only for the work that is done.

What we stand behind

On a landed home, everything we build carries a seven-year workmanship warranty from handover, and it follows the house — if you sell, the balance passes to the buyer. Painting is quoted at five years because that is Nippon's own warranty on the product, and I won't promise longer than the people who make it.

Wong Lye holds a BCA General Builder Class 2 (GB2) licence and is bizSAFE Level 3. Public liability insurance is in force for the whole of your project.

If you want to check my work first

Reasonable. Our A&A works page has before-and-after photographs of real landed projects — the same house, before we started and after we handed it back. Live Jobs shows what is happening on site right now, updated as the work happens.

If you are planning an A&A, reconstruction or rebuild on a landed home, message me directly. You will be talking to the person who will be on your site.