To ask which new build houses you would avoid

[bridgetreilly]

Looking for a house and there are several new build developments we’re interested in, but I’m finding it hard to get honest reviews. Are there builders with truly awful reputations that I shouldn’t even bother looking at?

And, conversely, has anyone got experience of a good quality new home that you love?

**All houses were new once

This is true, but houses were generally made to a much higher standard in the past. The new build construction industry is in a state these days. Some shocking examples of cutting corners and poor workmanship. Everyone I know in new builds has had a longlist of snags to sort out. At least buying an older house means you avoid the initial snagging.

I really don't understand this aversion to new builds? Yes some have problems, but so do many older houses. & tbh ALL houses at one point were new builds.
There are advantages to new builds - you can get good deals/discounts on the price; extras thrown in for the sale; good internal layouts; decent heating & modern conveniences.
We're in a Redrow house, bought new 9 years ago. It's a smallish estate of 150 homes or so. Every house has either a drive or allocated parking. Most houses have garages. All have gardens. They may not be huge; but they are fine. We had a few snags at the start, but all sorted within a few months. Houses on our estate sell quickly, but most houses haven't been sold since they were first moved into.
We were able to haggle with the builders over the sale price & got a big discount because we asked & that enabled us to buy a much nicer, larger house than we could have afforded on the open market.
One of my bugbears though is the garden in that this estate was built on a brownfield site (ex plant nursery) & there is a lot of rubble etc but if it was built on a greenfield site local people would complain about it concreting over green fields etc! You can't say new housing would only go on brownfield sites, then complain about the site.
Some people seem to romanticise older houses yet seem to ignore the bad points of them. Many don't have allocated parking/drives so you have to play car musical chairs everyday - how many threads are started due to parking? Victorian Terraces etc are identical houses, all packed together. I grew up in a 1930s house where there were at least 6 streets of exactly the same house, one after the other. Buying an older house means you don't know about what's wrong with it; how much has been done to it (or not) over the years. Layouts are often not to modern living standards & require additional work to make them more comfortable. & you may find that all 'character' has been ripped out.
A friend has a Victorian terrace - she didn't want a 'featureless' new build - instead she has an open chimney which means her house is usually freezing & costs ££ to heat. They moved into their house the same year we did & are still renovating it. They have to go through their neighbours garden to get their bins out etc. They've had problems with black mould, issues over parking & having to add an extension as soon as they moved in to replace the kitchen. The list goes on.
New builds have their problems; but so do all houses. Visit the properties; do your homework; ask around etc but ultimately choose a house you like & can afford.

I work as a regional journalist and we just have a constant stream of people coming to us with horrific problems on all kinds of new build estates. Awful build quality, walls you can’t hang a picture on, shonky fixtures, mud-covered roads because of the ongoing building, ridiculous ground rent schemes and huge ongoing costs for estate management, tiny gardens, garages that don’t fit a car in, streets that you can’t park on because they’re too narrow, complete absence of pavements.. Some of the timber-framed homes are only built to last 50 years!

I wouldn’t touch one with a barge pole. You’re much better buying something built pre-1990 ish.

DH owns a building firm and I used to work for a well known developer.

AVOID-
Persimmon
Bellway
Taylor Wimpey
Strata
Harron Homes
Jones Homes

Very cheap materials and I know for a fact that 3 of these don’t check the tradespersons are qualified. Lots of cover ups and the houses are built to a very low standard. Just because they provide NHBC warranty does NOT mean your house is well built.

Miller & David Wilson are probably your best bet.

@Enidblyton1

**All houses were new once

This is true, but houses were generally made to a much higher standard in the past. The new build construction industry is in a state these days. Some shocking examples of cutting corners and poor workmanship. Everyone I know in new builds has had a longlist of snags to sort out. At least buying an older house means you avoid the initial snagging.

I agree. And the thing is that some people buy new to avoid having to deal with the problems of dealing with tradesmen etc to do repairs/maintenance, yet end up having a snagging list of dozens of items that they have to deal with on a new build, resulting in lots of different tradesmen having to come in to correct.

In "theory" a new build should be a lot better and have few problems, but in reality, I actually think buying a well looked after older home is far less hassle.

Having said that, avoid a new build at all costs if you can.

Persimmon have a very bad name around here

I thought Cala was better but haven’t had personal experience

I think it really depends on the site manager, we bought a Bellway house a couple of years ago and had a really positive experience, love the house and they were great with initial snags. Council aren't going to adopt the development, and due to covid they're still working on landscaping which means we haven't started paying estate charges yet.

Definitely find out about road adoption and proposed estate charges, how much and how site will be managed. Very few new build estates now being adopted by the council.

Find out about adjacent land, we are situated at the edge of planned development, with part of the planning requiring a park at the edge so no chance of further development. Another estate in the village builders have just put in planning for more houses, they were open about this, but apparently only if you asked, some new residents thought they were buying a house overlooking fields buts its unlikely it will stay like that.

I had a partner who built new homes for a mid-sized independent. They are shockingly badly built. Wrong foundations, concrete that will not last more than a few years, let alone decades, garages that will fit a car in but you can't open the doors, no/tiny windows. Of course, the foundation and concrete issues won't come to light until a few years down the line. I wouldn't buy one with someone else's money. And they now get to sign off their own builds...still trying to work out the logic in that one.

I’ve never bought a new-build, having been put off by viewing many new ones where you can clearly see that they are under-sized (some were missing doors in attempts to make the bedrooms look bigger Etc.), and seeing the flimsy construction materials being used on the houses that were still being built.
However, we recently witnessed the construction of a couple of houses built on a large plot near where we live: despite replacing one rambling run-down 4-bedroom house with two detached 5-bedroom houses, we could see that the buildings were being built with very sturdy materials, and with great care. The builders were (rightly) very proud of their work when we complimented them on a great job when they finished (they both look fantastic) and told us a bit about the small company building them, and what they had added as fixtures and fittings to make them worth the money.
I would have bought one or both of these in a heartbeat if I had the money, or was looking to move, because we had seen the whole building process and quality.
So my tip would be to observe carefully what is being done on several sites and by different construction companies, to satisfy yourself that you are happy with the product before committing.

Three-story townhouses crammed onto land the size of a postage stamp.

Endless maze-like roads and awkward driveways with almost no garden.

Insufficient parking, bearing in mind that most families have at least 2 cars and everyone uses their garage for storage instead of its intended purpose.

Also don't agree that older homes are better, our last house was ex council 1970s and the build quality was awful, paper thin walls between terraced houses, little insulation had to do loads of work to update it. Before that we had a Victorian terrace and that was a money pit, again modernisation needed, sash windows seemed to constantly need repair and let it such a draft. Layout was awkward. We loved it, but it demanded attention!

New build has decent insulation, great layout, other than decorating it won't need much done to it for years. We bought the showhome so we didn't even need to hang curtains!

@WannaBeMonica

Has anyone had experience buying an almost new home? We're considering a 6 year old "new build" and wondering if we're likely to experience problems with it.

We bought a 4year old Taylor Wimpy house 5 years ago. Was great to get a pretty immaculate house without the new build price tag and the snagging having been done.

Our only issues (apart from the previous owners stealing our bins and grill pan) are the state of the soil in the garden (tiny layer of top soil over clay and rubble) which has meant we can't really have borders as such and our water pressure is so poor in the house and it's something they have done as the water company checked the pressure as it was coming in. I understand not wanting to waste water environmentally but it would be nice to be able to use both showers at the same time, also it has caused issues getting our boiler checked.

All in all I would recommend

In Scotland, I'd recommend Tulloch. Great design, solid quality of build and internal fittings.

All of them. I wouldn't ever consider a new build house. Poorly built, crammed in, over looking each house, lack of parking.....

There's a new Taylor Wimpey estate here which is anecdotally better than most.
A friend has a Linden house which has been atrocious.
These posts were interesting earlier this year:

KevinTheBird Tue 09-Feb-21 18:19:03

user85963842 I don’t know if it always generates experts. I guess house building is a massive business, so many different trades employed either full time or on an adhoc basis. Personally I was part of a sales team for Linden Homes and we’d get shunted from one development to another for 2-3 months at a time as they neared completion. This was over a decade ago so things may have changed now but absolutely every single tradesman on these developments told us they were built to an awful standard and were all completely open about it. I remember showing one couple round a home, I was struggling with the lock on the door and the entire handle fell off in my hand 🤦‍♀️. They didn’t buy it for some reason.

I’m sure it varies from developer to developer and hopefully standards are higher these days. It put me off ever wanting to buy a new build though!

KevinTheBird Tue 09-Feb-21 22:43:56

certainly when I was working there Linden and Persimmon were well known as being the absolute worst. I was part of the personalised sales team so you’d have one contact to lead you through the entire sale and then be the contact for any snagging issues afterwards. As soon as we finished on one development all calls and emails from the buyers of homes from that development were rerouted to a generic customer service one that, as far as I know, had a couple of people working there for the entire company. It was appalling.

Recently friends of ours have all bought from Redrow, Bloor and Wainhomes.

Our friends’ Redrow is beautiful. They had some snagging issues but it’s a lovely house and looks really well finished.

Our friends who bought from Bloor and Wainhomes haven’t had such a great experience! The houses just look a bit shoddy in comparison.

We used to live in a David Wilson and hated it. Semi detached and the soundproofing was non-existent. The boiler packed in after 6 years and for some reason they’d designed the house so that the boiler pipe work went through 2 floors, it was an absolute nightmare (and very expensive!!) to sort out (and yes we did contact DW under the 10 year warranty and they fobbed us off).

@bridgetreilly I live in a Bellway home and it's fab! No issues whatsoever. Really good build quality. In North Yorkshire

@DGRossetti

If you wanted quality, you wouldn't be looking at new builds, really.

Mine is extremely good quality

Avoid timber frames, and ensure the build is traditional.

I've lived in 2 Taylor Wimpey, they're not very sound proofed, and being timber framed noise travelled well.

Mine too!

That’s in response to CervixHaver

I’ve had a joiner come to lay some wooden flooring for me and he told me that as well as working for himself, he also contacts himself out to local building developers.

There’s a developer near me that used to get awards here there and everywhere for the high quality standards, but as the company grew, the standards seemed to fall. It certainly doesn’t have the same prestige as it originally did.

Joiner told me that he went to lay flooring in a couple of these expensive houses and the floors were shocking.

The same contractors will work on different developments, so I wouldn’t necessarily assume that ones deemed more expensive are representation of better build quality, because the sabe workmen are likely to work across different company’s.

I assume the more expensive ones have more expensive fixtures/fittings etc, larger windows, real wood doors etc...and things that add value, as oppose to a set of superior builders/joiners etc - because again, many of them work on different developments!

No to Persimmon but yes to Hoggs.

any estate with inadequate parking. Very popular here. Twisty little roads without pavements. The roads lead nowhere but are unsafe for children to play on, not least because parked cars are on every it of space.

I'm an ecofreak & love idea of minimal car-areas. But reality intrudes.