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Build Quality - Guardian


Guest Alphonsox

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I'm not convinced that it's not profitable to build better quality homes at all.  I've been watching the mass developers who have been building hundreds of new homes around the Salisbury area over the past few years, and they are all pretty poor, and regularly seem to attract complaints from buyers.  The amount of waste during the building process seemed to me to be ludicrous, as if no one cared about ordering the right quantities of material in the first place.  Same with the amount of re-work that seemed to be inherent in the process.  I've seen one estate access road dug up and resurfaced three times now, not because the quality was poor, but because yet another service trench needed to go in after it had been surfaced.  Same goes with the cost of snagging; it seems that a typical snagging list will have 30 to 40 items that have to be corrected post-build, at a cost that has to be greater than the cost of just spending a bit more time in getting it right first time.

 

One thing that seems to be a significant cause for many problems is piss poor planning.  The developers seems to have a haphazard approach to managing tasks, from what I've seen as an interested observer.  Perhaps it's related to scale, with larger developments being a fair bit harder to keep well-organised.

 

It's absolutely true that buyers have sod all choice.  Most buyers are constrained by the amount of money they can access and their location and family needs, so they end up getting what they are given, in effect.  The big developers know this, so have no incentive to do anything different.  Add in planning policies that often dictate a high density of housing and it's pretty inevitable that design and quality is going to be compromised.

 

The biggest problem seems to be the availability of land and it's cost, though.  I think we're reaching a point in rural areas where we need to find mechanisms to limit the cost of land, so that decent affordable homes can be built for people who live and work in the area.

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1 hour ago, Temp said:

Are any of the big builders ISO9000 registered? Perhaps someone should revoke their registration :-)

I have a huge disrespect for ISO9000 because my observation was it had absolutely nothing to do with improving quality, it just produces a paper trail of tick boxes and arse covering so you can say "not my fault"

 

I cringed when my last employer said thy were introducing it as I just knew it would take my job even further from design to meaningless paperwork for no practical benefit.

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People get sucked into buying what's displayed in the show home which of course is finished, in a cosmestic sense at least, and cleverly furnished to make it seem spacious. Then of course when completion day comes for their own house it's not finished properly and there are tons of issues. The time I bought a new house we used to go down every weekend to see how it was getting on. On the weekend before we were due to complete there was still so much to do and there were so many houses in the same position all due to complete on the same day to hit the builder's end of year accounts. On completion day I went down in the morning and there was so much that was still not finished that we refused to complete. The builder said they would sue us and I said go ahead as I had lots of photos showing that the kitchen and bathrooms weren't even finished, there was a massive hole in the threshold and it simply wasn't ready. We decided that if we completed we would have little leverage to get them to fix the issues asap. So they did fix the main issues and we completed a couple of weeks later. We had the luxury of not planning to move in on that day anyway as we still had our other property, but others with a chain had no choice and had to move into far from finished houses. Of course that didn't stop issues with poor workmanship from surfacing later but we did at least get a number of issues sorted before we handed over the cash. 

 

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27 minutes ago, Simplysimon said:

these are from a decent house buider in our area, anyone want to guess a price? small seaside town with houses not far from shore, some will/may have sea view

 

 

Knowing the premium they put on new homes - 300k? I quite like the layout TBH. It would probably suit me. 

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1 minute ago, Simplysimon said:

my guess when asked by wife was only a bit more, (under 200k) going by prices of new build 4&5 bed locally.

 

New houses are always crazy money and bungalows even more so. 

 

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7 hours ago, Simplysimon said:

these are from a decent house buider in our area, anyone want to guess a price? small seaside town with houses not far from shore, some will/may have sea view

 

Capture.PNG

 

I'll put us out of our misery - it is a development at a place called Seamill.

 

Three types of bungalow (*). I think these numbers are right.

 

Halyard - 2 bed - 71sqm - £230,000 = £3300 per sqm

Lanyard - 3 bed - 114sqm - £280,000 = £2450 per sqm

Gimbal - 3 bed - 124sqm - £303,000 = £2450 per sqm

 

Brochure attached. Rightmove site here.

 

Ferdinand

 

(*) Apparently the local for "bungalow" is "single storey cottage". ?

chapelton-brochure.pdf

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8 hours ago, Tennentslager said:

£250k max unless it's in crazy priceland that's called SE England

 

I'd expect over double that in Edinburgh. New places regularly over £400 per square foot in nice areas.

 

Central London £1500-2000 per sq foot for new stuff which has a crazy premium often approaching double the price of similar sized places in the area.

 

 

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7 hours ago, the_r_sole said:

@JSHarris your point about snagging is spot on, when we did some for a house builder the rules were if there were three items in a room we stopped in that room and if that happened in three rooms in any house we stopped inspection and came back when they had snagged it properly themselves - unfortunately the bigger builders don't care at all what they are handing over, just as long as it's handed over

 

I’ve just finished snagging for a small ish building firm but high end property however it was done at 5 stages through the build. By the last inspection they pretty much had it nailed but that one was only one of the 3 they were building.

 

No idea if what was picked up was passed on to the other builds but I do know they ditched the groundwork’s company over the issues with the drainage. 

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