There are many consultancy bureaus that don't visit. You need to have a face to face (end 80s/beginning 90s there were telephone calls, but indeed you would not get it cross the line like that) meeting(s). I still do that now. But after you discussed basically the ideas, you can go home to build the software. They don't accept that from freelancers sometimes in NL or DE either, but from 'serious companies' they do. I have not had any case where I had to sit in the office; sure, visit once per few months, but that's it. And driving/train-ing/plane-ing that is a small price to pay (company pays ofcourse).