[Closed] New build Hierarchy

New build Hierarchy

Just about OK
Sh*te
Sh*tty
Sh*ttier still
Sh*ttier than a sh*tty thing on a pile of sh*te

(YMMV)

That's awesomely helpful thanks.

Anyone who's actually set foot in one ?.

There's a huge new estate at Rosewell, near where you are looking. Loads and loads of identical houses, not only identical to each other, but which look exactly the same as pretty much any other housing estate built in the last twenty years anywhere in the UK. The sign by the main road isn't from one of the big names you mention and it says in big letters 'Dare to be different '
Always makes me chuckle.
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Sorry, about as much use as Matt

Some developments are better than others, even from the same developer. And even within those developments some houses are better than others. I have no insight beyond that. Finding a new house isn't supposed to be easy.

Used to work on sites. As above, houses vary depending on site manager and contractors.

I live in one of the cheaper new builds £179,000 for a three bed detached with Garage.
Was built by Gleeson homes on the site of a old factory.
Buying experience was good, extras were offensively expensive outdoor tap £300, a back gate £500 turf to the rear £600 so we did it ourselves for less than the price of a outdoor tap.
Driveway is stones, soon replaced that with tarmac. Brickwork straight and tidy.
Plastering was ok, some tiny cracks after 12 months but easily sorted.
Worst thing we encountered was a electrical fault the house was split in three loops lights, back of house sockets front of house sockets. One loop stopped working (front sockets) so they put it onto 4 loops upstairs sockets and downstairs, no problems since.

Been in three years now and happy with it, it’s warm and well insulated, doesn’t creak or crack and a nice place to live. Better than the old 1930 built death trap terrace house previously. Damp everywhere, poorly insulated etc.

Our initial experience was with Barratt.

Dealings with the developers seem to be aggravating and depressing, the only point of contact seems to be (deliberately?) clueless and evasive sales staff, so there's lots of stuff you only find out after the fact, such as the 'one off' payment of £135 to Scottish Woodlands actually being a recurring annual payment, you're tied to BT's most expensive broadband, the council won't adopt the development so you need a private factor (parasites!) etc. etc.

However the actual house was fine once we'd had the usual arguments about snagging which required us to blackmail them with a poor NHBC survey response before they came out and rectified basic stuff like leaking bathtub seals and dangerous finishing on skirting boards etc.

So in short, buying was unpleasant and annoying, but living in it was fine, no regrets.

We've since moved and swore we wouldn't go new-build again, but housing market being as it is, here we are, buying a Muir home. They seem more generous than Barratt but I'm very suspicious about the constant changes to spec, feels like they're just using up whatever materials they still have, and the sales lady is also very good at avoiding difficult questions e.g. when might it actually be complete (even by her vague verbal estimations only it's slipping behind).

According to a couple of folk we spoke to, I think the heirarchy is something like

Cala
Walker
David Wilson (effectively Barrat but bigger/nicer areas?)
Milne
Muir
Barrat
all the others (we didn't consider anything from Bellway/Persimmon etc. Bellway in particular seem to like building right next to motorways...).

That’s awesomely helpful thanks.

Anyone who’s actually set foot in one ?.

My BiL and sister in law own a £650k large developer house. Lets just say the whole timber frame is wonky, doors don't shut, upstairs has wonky floors like a 300 year old house. All going to court.

Previously they owned a Barratt - it took about a year of arguing and faffing to have all sorts re-done, from wonky doors to leaking pipes and iffy electrics, let alone huge cracking plaster and creaking/moving stairs.

I lived in new house from local developer - damp problems throughout the whole downstairs . Transpired that damp proof was breached all over the place. After 5 years we left and the whole downstairs needed concrete breaking up and DPC installing.

(I can go on if you would like...)

Bloody hell, hope that's not a reflection on the local Stirlingshire contractors Matt! Ours is still being built...

Thanks for those replies.

Belway are building , starting a brand new town next to me and it's sandwiched between the A1 and the Edinburgh London rail line.

Interesting to see Walker so well regarded, they are on the radar as they have a new place starting in Tranent soon.

The "hidden" issues post, well done , thats the kind of insight you rarely get.

Alanwater ?

Sounds like you have a really shit experience.
I spoke to two people yesterday who have just bought Walker homes and their reviews were glowing.

I suspect local agents, site managers and contractors may be the differing factors.

We bought new build 6 years ago (Linden, East Yorkshire). No real issues apart from minor snagging stuff. But, as mentioned above, you are tied in to a provate grounds maintenance company that is completely unregulated. Their prices might be OK now, but nothing really to stop them doubling it the next year. And, the major thing, if you look in to the details of the TP1 document - they have the power to repossess your house if you don't pay up. So, therefore, never a true freehold property as there will always be a someone else with a vested interest.
We moved last year and looked at new builds again, but I was never comfortable with it and we've now got a nice 1970's semi with loads more space in the street and not built on top of each other.

Imagine a factory where they build cars.

A highly controlled environment assemble thousands of components, all identical in each vehicle, using robots that repeat every process identically the same time in a precise and logical manner. Every bolt is torqued to a precise specification every time and the processes are all quality checked as they go. There are no bespoke parts.

Now imagine if that factory were in a muddy field with no roof. There are no robots, just itenerant workers of wildly varying quality. Some have been building the same cars for years, some have only ever worked on buses or trains or bicycles. There are huge amount of bespoke parts on the car which need to be cut to size. The coordination of the processes also varies wildly and is highly weather dependent. The quality control process is virtually impossible to monitor accurately and the workers get paid on production output which encourages them to take shortcuts and hide mistakes.

It's doesn't really matter who the manufacturer is. It's the unavoidably chaotic nature of the manufacturing process that makes the end result a bit of a lottery.

Good luck.

In a previous job I worked for a company that supplied house builders. Speaking to site managers and contracts managers they throw the houses up once they sell it. The quicker it's "finished" the quicker the builder gets the money. That means loads of agency and sub-contract labour bashing away to get the job done quick. As others have said, they can be good quality but they can be terrible. When we bought our place a few years ago we avoided the new build estates for this reason. If they are keen on a new build, buy one of the last few on the estate when the builder is getting ready to pack up and close the show home and sales office. That way you can see what you have bought, not some pictures and a promise of a good job.

Also beware of show homes. We looked at one years ago. The master bedroom seemed really big until we questioned the size of the bed. Having been told it was a standard bed we had a better look and realised it was a 3/4 bed. They also had the show home and sales office in neighbouring houses. They removed the fence between the back gardens and set it up as if it was one garden. When we questioned this the sales lady swiftly guided us out of the house so other potential buyers couldn't hear our questions.

It’s the unavoidably chaotic nature of the manufacturing process that makes the end result a bit of a lottery.

I think this is a good summary of our experience.

It wasn't Allanwater for reference - and one of the houses is in Nottinghamshire...

I was reading up on building control shenanigans on some large scale developments. The first house / showhome is built to exacting standards and gets signed off by building control. The rest are built without the same level of care or scrutiny and it can be a lottery as to whether you had a conscientous builder or not. Often it is the unwitting owner who finds out the hard way that some key detail has been missed when water starts coming in or they find a damp patch.

Not Scotland but...

My brothers both bought new builds from the same builder about 60mi apart. The only thing in common is the developer's name and the premium or otherwise for it being developer a not b.

Quality varies between the two significantly.

On one, quality along the street varies drastically, odd numbers are all a bit naff compared to even despite being "the same" (because that's the side they built first). The second and third phases of the same build are visibly less well built, lawns made mostly of spoil from phase 1, finished in a hurry etc.

They both looked around and developers who looked to be good here were bad there and so on.

Slightly higher spec at developer A vs B in all instances but a fancy kitchen doesn't mean that the windows fit and so on.

The reality was the only way to know if it was going to be any good was to go look and look hard at the one they were thinking of buying.

I bought a Redrow house in Dalkeith (Easter Langside) following the sale, Redrow pulled out of Scotland and the development was completed by Springfield. The house was ok, a small 2 bed terrace. very minor snagging apart from the bath drain not being secured and water poured out through the light fitting. after that we had no issues. We have since moved.

The new builds in Penicuik (at Greenlaw) are £40k more for a similar sized house 5 years on.

I've heard Cala cost more as you get a few meters more per house. apart from that they use similar materials and labour, but you buy the dream yeah?

After working for house builders as a tree surgeon on site clearence jobs they're all the same just at different price points be that Bellway, Avent, Wimpy, Barrett, AMA, Cala...............

Edit:
I've also worked witha lot of subbies who changed careers, roofers who were paid by teh roof so would only secure half the tiles they had to, it meant they got 5 roofs completed that week not 4.

Currently live in a Belway flat/development in London.

Our flat is actually fine, but everyone else in our block have had all sorts of issues.

In one particular funny (ish) instance, a neighbour thought their circulation system was rather weak in a particular part of a room. They got a guy in to take a look, and it turns out the plumber had put a copper pipe right where the ventilation pipe would need to go, so they just capped it off and didn't bother connecting it!

Another flat had flooding from the roof raining down on their balcony - turns out someone left a drinks can in the drain on the roof which then caused it to block.

But others have had more serious issues, long standing leaks, unsealed windows, etc.

The block opposite in our development has some penthouses on the roofs with flower beds. No one bothered to architect the drainage for the flowers so a year later all the standing water has destroyed the ceilings of the top floors - they had scaffolding up for most of 2020 fixing it.

Theres other stupid things like communal doors not locking etc. It's all just silly stupid stuff but it mounts up.

The worst our flat has is some shoddy skirting board that they clearly measured once and cut once - theres about a 20mm gap at one end that they couldn't be arsed to fix.

it took about a year of arguing and faffing to have all sorts re-done, from wonky doors to leaking pipes and iffy electrics, let alone huge cracking plaster and creaking/moving stairs.

Looking from the outside and having seen some of the cowboys that put up houses in this part of the world from the inside. Why would anyone have the constructors shonky contractors back on the property?

They have all ready demonstrated that they are incapable of doing it right first time.

Didn't recognise the part of Dalkeith you were talking about... I went to school there back in the 80s, just had a nosy round on Google Maps and the place has got a lot bigger since then! Wonder how much longer Newbattle will remain green and pleasant before all the gaps get filled in...

Interesting that Cala seem to have a good reputation north of the border.

What they have done here (Winchester) is a travesty. They’ve turned what was a nice bit of countryside next to the City into a cross between a really grim army barracks (aka “affordable homes” for the peasants) and vastly overpriced houses made of actual Lego (for the slightly better off people). The whole thing is heartbreaking.

I looked at a 5 year old new build and the road was privately maintained, as mentioned above totally unregulated as the road maintenance was 200pa per house, you are pretty much held to ransom as you can not go anywhere else. Shame, house was nice but I didn't like the effective toll to access it.