New build developers with poor reviews?

Smeghead · 18 Oct 2021 at 15:27

I know there's no definitive answer to this and varies massively from company to company and location to location, but is it worth the potential hassle of pursuing a new build home if the company has bad reviews? A lot of the companies I research seem to have just awful reviews (3 stars or less), especially when you read things like they pull a bait and switch and have people go right near the end of precedings before pulling out of the sale to hike the price up, and leaving the original buyer out of pocket with solicitor fees. Really doesn't fill you with confidence about handing them over vast amounts of money.

Are there any other red flags I should be looking for outside of the usual? Like I noticed they posted a fairly substantial loss for last year, so that could indicate they may be more likely to cut corners and look to reduce costs maybe?

ci_newman · 18 Oct 2021 at 16:14

Name and shame the builder

Cloak and daggers aren't going to help you at all here.

200sols · 18 Oct 2021 at 16:34

They all have bad reviews. Get a professional snagger and let them deal with the issues, and there will be issues.

MassiveJim · 18 Oct 2021 at 22:45

a lot of the negative reviews will be based on poor build quality, and whilst some are generally better than others it still comes down to the contractor they are using on the area.
so they might have excellent build quality in one area of the country and not so good in another.

stuman · 18 Oct 2021 at 23:49

It can even vary quite a lot between the same company, it depends on the teams they have on.

We are very happy with ours, we had a snagging list which is nearly done that we made our selves.

we also had “HouseScan” come and do a snag list for us which was a big waste of money. They said it was one of the best new builds they have seen and the list was only 46 items long that we had mostly already spotted anyway.

Go and ask if you can go and look around any half built houses you’ll get a better feel for the quality.

BYTEr · 19 Oct 2021 at 12:38

We bought a new build from Persimmon in October 2017 who at the time had awful reviews and it came as no surprise that they were awful after we had completed, thankfully, for the most part we had no serious snags and it allowed us to get on the ladder and we're now in a position to be looking to move to a much bigger house (houses on our development are currently selling very quickly at around 25-30%% more than the purchase price), we won't ever been be buying another new build from Persimmon.

BUDFORCE · 19 Oct 2021 at 13:17

Most new build houses are ****.

Most are also overvalued.

But hey, people buy them so.....

MassiveJim · 19 Oct 2021 at 14:02

BUDFORCE said:
Most new build houses are ****.

Most are also overvalued.

But hey, people buy them so.....

what choice is there ?

we cant keep growing as a population and live in the same houses, so of course people will buy them

HangTime · 19 Oct 2021 at 17:23

I guess New Build debate has been had numerous times before but to reopen the can of worms I think the 'overvalued' claim depends on what one values. In terms of floor area, modern living space etc they can represent reasonable value. This may be in part because they sit on smaller plots and have shoddy build quality, but rightly or wrongly some people only really care about interior space and less about the plot size. Certainly when we bought our new build house it wasn't as if the same money would have got us something much bigger in the same town. It's quite common now to see new builds over 3 stories to maximise living space for a given plot size, this makes sense to me and we should be building high to accommodate the population growth.