Why are new builds teeny tiny?

[Baptiste11]

Went to view a new housing estate yesterday and had a look round the show home. Well. It was tiny. It was a 3 bed semi with parking for 2 cars but inside I could not believe the room dimensions.

The kitchen/diner had a small table and chairs in, the lounge was so tiny it only had a small two seater and an armchair. The family bathroom had no window and was tiny. The master bedroom did have a small fitted wardrobe but the other two bedrooms had no wardrobe space and were furnished with only a bedside table and dressing table - no room for a chest of drawers etc

For the price of what was obviously meant to be a family home I couldn’t believe how small it was. The thought of spending lockdown in the tiny living room made me shudder. There was also nowhere anyone could work from home - no room for a desk and chair.

How do developers get away with building such tiny properties?

Apparently most of the development is sold out & there is a waiting list for the next phase!
And you have to pay a service charge and a grounds fee every year (which they can increase whenever they want) just for the pleasure of living there!

GETTINGLIKEMYMOTHER

Dh moved the dividing (stud) wall, to make them more equal sized - the bigger is still a good sized double - why on earth the builders didn’t do that in the first place defeats me

This is what I meant. I know some of these new build houses are small but there is so much wasted space. I think I could make a better designed and more practical house that wouldn’t feel so cramped just using the same space.
So many unnecessary en-suites, hallways and walls, plug holes and radiators in the wrong position.

We are in a second hand new build. The lounge is bigger than in our previous 1950s build, and the kitchen is double the size. The master and second bedrooms are of a very generous size - again much bigger than the 1950s build and the third you can fit a double bed, wardrobe, drawers etc.

It is very well designed too. The drive holds 3 cars and the garage holds a fourth.

It's also a lovely community, soundproofing is excellent and bills are low.

They can't all be judged the same. The ones on the estate that do go up for sale, sell very quickly.

We couldn't find a similar sized 50s or 60s house for even the same as we paid for this.

Zebrahooves

We have multiple vehicles and have yet to find a newer build house that wasn’t one of the big detached ones that have that amount of parking.
Equally garden size is usually an issue.
Our road has houses dating from the Victorian era to the 1970s and our plots are anything from a quarter of an acre to 2.5 acres. Top of the road has a couple of houses with more like 15-20 acres.
At the bottom of the road there is a development of new build detached houses.
Still only one car on the drive and one car in the garage and gardens that are around 25ft

They go for more than anything that comes available on my section of the road. No one can understand it. Places went up for 2 million + and were sold within days. Town planners got involved with the aesthetics of the development and it looks awful.
It could have looked like a nice development but at best it just looks wrong
Someone from the planning department had the developers put in a small child’s play park. The people buying these houses aren’t FTBs with small children, they are older couples with older children.
I pass it a lot and have never seen in the years they have been up anyone playing in it.

It is the planners just ticking boxes and resulting in a mess.

I suppose if people keep buying them they’ll keep getting away with it.

I think often the new build houses themselves can be a good size especially at the upper end. The thing that put me off was service charge but also the gardens and layout. I’ve got a couple of friends in high end new builds that will be worth over £1m. For both sites parking is crap although they have some off road space, they are overlooked and the gardens are small. The actual houses are amazing though- really well laid out, spacious and high end fittings. It wouldn’t be for me though as I like a garden too much and much prefer a more traditional street layout.

I do agree about the street layouts, new builds are windy streets, difficult to see with parked cars. I prefer straight roads much better to drive on in bad weather conditions. It’s apparently designed by computers to fit in the most number of houses. The developers input how many of each design they want to build and the computer comes up with where each house will go.

The windy streets are for safety reasons, they have a lot of measures to slow traffic down, any straight roads on many new build estates I've been on will have random extra grassy curbed areas that partially block the road, it avoids long straight roads that become rat runs.

@user89764

The windy streets are for safety reasons, they have a lot of measures to slow traffic down, any straight roads on many new build estates I've been on will have random extra grassy curbed areas that partially block the road, it avoids long straight roads that become rat runs.

Shit if you use a wheelchair, by the way. But that's another thread entirely.

I have a particular dislike for Redrow, as we were invited by leaflet to see one of their new builds and discovered the entire showhome was deliberately surrounded by pea shingle - impossible to use a wheelchair on. It was in that round of visits we learned that "level access" is something other people do.

Shit if you use a wheelchair, by the way. But that's another thread entirely.

The paths aren't windy on our estate, the path is long and straight, they added grassy curves to make the road meander, not the path. Thankfully the parking is good on our estate too, our last estate was awful for pedestrians due to parking on pavements, I agree that is often an after thought on many estates.

I have a new build, it’s 1700 square feet for 4 beds. Not a mansion but hardly small.

1700 square foot is a mansion.

Most of the 4 bed new homes near me are roughly 1200 square foot, with a pocket sized garden and no garage or facilities near by. They also cost over 500k.