New build properties

[big_white_dog84]

TaylorWimpey Boxes, with beige carpets, beige walls and furniture from Next: a lot of people seem to think if you have one of these houses you have made it in life.
I work on a LOT of new housing estates and they throw up these houses in a couple of days. They look good initially, but after a couple of years really start to show the effects of having so little effort put into them.
There's another new issue that most people don't know about - most new housing estates have electricity, gas and water networks owned by private companies, not the local electricity / gas / water board. That means if you have a fault on the cables / pipes in your estate then you will be relying on a private company with no local presence coming to fix it - in one case I heard of recently an engineer, digging squad and cable jointers drove from London to Fife to fix a fault, and the houses were off for over 24 hours! Ironically the local board had two members of staff living on the estate, off supply and powerless (pardon the pun) to help.
Ofgem doesn't care because the developer got their connection 50p per house cheaper!

 

[HungryHippos]

TaylorWimpey Boxes, with beige carpets, beige walls and furniture from Next: a lot of people seem to think if you have one of these houses you have made it in life.
I work on a LOT of new housing estates and they throw up these houses in a couple of days. They look good initially, but after a couple of years really start to show the effects of having so little effort put into them.
There's another new issue that most people don't know about - most new housing estates have electricity, gas and water networks owned by private companies, not the local electricity / gas / water board. That means if you have a fault on the cables / pipes in your estate then you will be relying on a private company with no local presence coming to fix it - in one case I heard of recently an engineer, digging squad and cable jointers drove from London to Fife to fix a fault, and the houses were off for over 24 hours! Ironically the local board had two members of staff living on the estate, off supply and powerless (pardon the pun) to help.
Ofgem doesn't care because the developer got their connection 50p per house cheaper!

Happen to have recently purchased a TW home and must say my home is not too bad, a few issues with minor things that are being sorted as time goes on and I get around to organising people to come and sort them out. I have plenty of space but no garden (my house is very similar to a flat in design it's a Coach House). On the flip side it's freehold so I just pay a relatively small service charge every year (£180 a year instead of £100 a month for a normal flat around here). I also get 2 allocated parking spaces which is a god send.

I happen to think that Beige carpets are best for a more neutral look, so I had them put in myself after I got the keys with good quality 50oz Wool and proper Underlay. I also got a cool stripy carpet for the stairs that I think looks really good and is slightly more hard wearing which is better for stairs anyway.

I went for White Walls rather than the default Magnolia and I am happy I did seeing the Magnolia other people have used on my development!

For me it's mostly silly things like missing a shelf in one of kitchen cupboards, small chip taken out of my skirting board going up the stairs, a bit of patching up needed with paint work, a few places needed sealing with mastic where they had missed it, slightly loose tap etc.

For me nothing I would class as "major" or "deal breaking". Reading a lot of reports on the net I think that I was expecting a lot more problems/snagging than I've had to do yet. On a relatively small development though, and I have been watching them building the houses opposite me, they don't appear to be rushing them.

I am a perfectionist so I think my standards of what is good enough are probably higher than most of the volume build tradesmen would do.

Saying that, the tiler did a really good job, and so far the electrician seems to have done a good job too. I am less convinced about how good a job the plumber did, and the kitchen fitters were not very good either (although I think that is the fault of the kitchen fitter company to be honest - they are coming back in to put a few things right for me Monday).

Nothing wrong with new builds I think, just got to be lucky enough to get onto a site with a decent site manager who gets the jobs done to a good standard to begin with.

 

[HangTime]

My views:

+Ability to spec out the interior design how you want it so it is ready for when you move in
+Part-exchange may be of interest if you don't want the hassle of selling your home on the open market
+Usually some offers like stamp duty paid, shared equity etc making it more affordable if that is a concern
+2 years snagging
+Lots of new people moving into the estate with similar stories to tell so potentially easier to build friendships with neighbours compared to a street where everyone already knows each other and didn't buy off the same developer
+Energy efficient
+No forward chain
+Likely to be reasonably free from through traffic as a lot of new build estates by their very nature are built in open space i.e. no reason for people to travel through them unless they are going to one of the properties (generalisation but holds true based on my house and those of friends and family)
+Turnkey i.e. all new and shiny

-Likely to be sub-standard build quality on average
-Address/postcode may not be recognised straight away by some companies making it trickier to order certain things (e.g. Insurance) at first, also a problem for sat navs
-Potential slippage of completion date
-Possibly a lot of site noise/traffic depending on stage of the development
-Fewer points of reference in terms of previous sale prices for the street (although in some cases with more mature developments it can go the other way in terms of there being sale prices available for the exact same style of property)
-Sometimes some weird shenanigans in terms of third parties you wouldn't expect from most older properties (IGT, and we have to pay an annual fee to this land management company)
-Typically less outside space relative to the interior space
-Arguably more likely to get undesirables compared to an older estate due to social housing and finance schemes i.e. more chance of having poor neighbours that wouldn't be able to afford to buy a similar property in a more mature estate
-Likely to lose value quicker than older properties because as first owner you will have 'used up' some of the appeal of a new build (being able to spec it out how you want, shiny new feel etc). In other words you have to compete with new developments for the type of buyers who want a new property, whereas the type of buyers who want older/characterful stock have to look at second hand homes.

Thankfully we haven't been majorly impacted by the above negatives in the five years we've lived here,

Personally I don't really assess size in terms of positives and negatives because it all depends on what houses you look at. My new build 3 bed terraced house is bigger than my old victorian 3 bed terraced house we owned previously, the comparison is pretty meaningless because size/location and various other factors are all mashed into the price. Barring people with extreme requirements, if you have enough money you can get a big enough house, new build or otherwise.