Would you buy (or have you bought) a new build?

[GoofyIsACow]

I have always said i would never buy a new build but i have just seen a great opportunity (location, spec and price, on paper!) and i’m considering it!
I know new builds get bad press so would you mind sharing your experiences good and bad please?

We have a Redrow house and the bathroom sink must of been dropped and still put in, been here 2 years and they still haven't replaced it. Have seen many people sell their new build on our street and all my DH talks about is how he wants an old house 😁😁😁

I think if I won the lottery id build my own new build 🙃

Lots of sweeping generalisations on here!

We've been in our Bellway new build for 3 years and have admittedly had some battles with the builder. The customer care department are just utterly incompetant. But, with the exception of some garden niggles everything has been fixed.

Our house is a 4 bed detached, parking for 3 cars with visitor spaces on the street, largish garden, at least 3 metres between us and both neighbours. We're not overlooked and never will be, have plenty of space and everything is clean and fresh. Our master bedroom is huge, which will cause problems if we ever move as we filled it with giant furniture! The estate itself is only 75 houses, no social housing but a certain percentage of smaller, affordable homes. It has a playpark, wide streets and the builders planted trees. It's a lovely place to live. Every house that's sold since we moved in has sold for at least 10% more than the original sale price so they are obviously still desirable.

Honestly, my only niggle has been that there is a 2nd en suite and I think it's unnecessary. I dream of turning it into a walk in cupboard!

Some builders are better than others, we saw every showhome within 30 miles of Glasgow and the finish on some was very basic. Ours was slightly better as standard.

I've got various friends who paid more for 70s properties which are all smaller than ours, inside and out. And all of them have spent tens of thousands since moving in. I would love a Victorian property but it's unlikely to ever be in our price range and we have a lovely family home.

Thank you so much everyone for all your very varied opinions!
It’s clear that things vary by development, i may just give them a call and investigate a little further!
Thank you

Ours is 5 years old and was built by a small local builder rather than one of the big guns. It's on the site of an old brewery in the town centre, so there was a selection process rather than Taylor Wimpey or Persimmon waving cash about to buy it. We love it - it's a townhouse with 3 double bedrooms plus study and it was about £30k cheaper than other 3/4 beds in our town. It's now increased in value by £60k. No massive garden to look after but has a 30ft by 12ft area to sit out in, enough space for DS and a spare bedroom, 2 parking spaces, and a nice kitchen.

I echo all the comments that it varies massively depending on who builds the house, whether it's on an estate, etc. They say that with new builds (or any build I suppose) that you can only have two out of the following three: good price, good quality, on time. We just finished ours, and we went for price and quality. It took ages to finish but really we are happy.

My main advice if you going in to investigate the possibility in depth would be:

1. Ask to see the specifications of what's included and go over it with a fine tooth comb. Don't take any work for granted (painting, bathroom vanities, garden work, etc. We had to pay an extra 10k at the end of our project for the painting of all our raw plaster walls. Before you buy is the time to negotiate in any little extras. You will want to get as much as you can included in your contract.

2. Ask about flexibility with choices you can make regarding specifications, materials, layout, etc. before you buy anything to make sure you can do what you want to do with it. Get things in writing that they say the will be able to change, and agree on a price in writing for those things before you sign. Our project was highly customisable, and we agreed on lots of things with the sales manager of the construction company that either turned out to not be feasible or turned out to be far more expensive than they said it would be, and saying, "But he told us...!" does not hold up in court.

1. Investigate the legalities of what happens if they go bust, don't finish, go way over time, etc. You want to cover your bum. Our builder took an extra 6 months to finish, and although we had been told we were entitled to a payment for every day the project ran over, we didn't realise that the compensation was peanuts, certainly not enough to pay for alternative accommodation. Ask those questions now.

All of this is not to say that we are unhappy now that we are in. The build quality is very good, we have lovely high ceilings, the house is massive and well proportioned with lots of storage, utility room, a two car driveway and a garage, walk-in closets, good outdoor space, etc. We are mid terrace but would never know it because the insulation is top notch. We also are in a group of just 4 houses in a really lovely area, so not an estate. All of those things matter! It was a pain to build, and expensive, but we're glad we did it. It's also gone up in value quite a lot since we bought.

Really good point about specifications and negotiating the small things @Linguaphile

We did the negotiating of certain things but my next purchase I’d go over it with a fine tooth comb per room

As an example, our family bathroom doesn’t have a shower unit, just the shower head attached to the bath taps. However tiles around the bathroom only come up half way up the wall, so you could get an attachment to stretch the shower cord and head up to standing height, but you’d wet all the wall if you had a shower standing up.

Another example, the tiling in the kitchen / diner stopped half way through the room. Didn’t make sense. The show room had tiles from entrance all the way through hall and to the back of house where kitchen/diner was. It was already done when we got there and they wouldn’t change it. Had we have known, we would have paid additional for tiles throughout.

We live in a 20 year old new build, but it’s only 1 of 5 at the bottom of an older street.

My colleague bought a brand new David Wilso home 2 years ago. I reallly don’t think that more than a month has gone by without her needing to get the builders back in.

I've had 2 redrows and they've been great. Friends nearby have been less impressed (but still happy wnough) with Miller.

Yes, there are compromises (character, garden space, space between detached houses, awkwardness of weird parking space) but for us, they were worth it (great storage, well thought out floor plan, new electric/heating systems, amazing insulation, no problems related to older house e.g. roof, subsidence, drainage, woodwork etc).

Actually we did have a problem with the dormer windows but was covered by NHBC.

I rented a new build flat and had loads of problems. It was an attic flat and I had issues with the windows but also with cracks and flooring.

I think the block was fairly cheaply built so I'm sure not all new builds are the same but it did put me off. Plus they always seem so lacking in character. My in laws live in a new build and I find it very cold and soulless.

I wouldn’t count it out completely but would be extremely cautious about:
Room size
Storage
Quality inc flimsy walls
Garden size
Parking
Small plots/proximity to other houses
Possible problems with resale
Reputation of developer
Ground rent if leasehold
Social housing

I live on a new build estate with sections developed by different companies. Our bit is built by Linden and is definitely the nicest - they look like houses rather than the blocky townhouse style of the other developers. Nice ceiling height on each floor, big storage cupboards built in. Build quality seems good and lots of little design touches to keep it interesting inside and out. The kitchen and garden are small but we have the cheapest possible option so we were happy to accept and make the most of the space. The development has several playparks and green spaces so we use those if we want to spend time outside. Lots of families and a sense of community.

Downsides apart from small kitchen - snagging took a while and we were advised not to paint or put up pictures for a year until that was completed. Roads didn't get gritted the first year but resolved now. Building work still going on around the estate. Massive windows/french doors are lovely for light but reduce wall space available. 3rd bedroom is in attic (but there is still a separate loft space in the eaves above it).

I've always loved old houses but we went from a draughty Victorian terrace with leaky roof to this and it has been fantastic.

I would consider buying a new build, but have never found one that I like.

A lot of the developments near me do not have enough parking and they seem to make the roads really narrow (one I am not sure you could actually get two way traffic on).

A lot of the developments are quite crammed in, so you are more overlooked. I prefer not to be, but that depends on what you like and where you are on the development.

Most developments, especially those around me, do have to have social housing on them. That ends up a mix of social rented (so council houses) and shared ownership (where the person buys a share in the house and the housing association owns the rest - usually a normal family who just can't afford the full price). One development here put all the social housing at the entrance to the development. It may a bit of a generalisation but the shared ownerships look after their properties more but a lot of the council tenants here do not so they just do not give that good of an impression going onto the site.

There is also a massive difference between quality depending on development. My SIL lives in a Charles Church (I think) which is lovely and seems well built. There are other builders on the same development and I looked at a few showhomes and they look good quality too.

Here we mostly have Persimmon and the quality is just not there on the ones I have seen and they are just thrown up - there has been a scandal here recently as it turned out that they were forgetting to put the fire-proofing measures in to all the houses on the developments - one house had a fire and the whole row went up as there were no fire-prevention measures between them.

I bought a new Linden home about 7 years ago. I think I was phase 2 (of 6 or 7) so the estate was still being built while I lived there. I had lots of niggles with the house (mainly cheap fixtures and fittings which weren't fit for purpose).

The master bedroom could fit a king size bed in and that was about it, due to having an unnecessary en-suite, without which the master bedroom would have been a more reasonable size. It was only a 2-bed house and had a massive bathroom between the two bedrooms!

The garden was tiny and there was totally inadequate parking. I lived there for about 3 years then sold up (the house served a purpose when I needed to move to the area quickly). The more houses that were built, the more apparent the problems with lack of parking became. The tiny garden was overlooked on all sides as well.

Friends that still live there say that there are still numerous issues with the development, for example street lighting not working. The estate still hasn't been adopted and Linden have effectively disappeared now the building is finished so nothing is being done. Until the roads are adopted they can have no parking restrictions put in so just driving round the estate is difficult due to cars parked everywhere (most houses only have one allocated space/car port).

The "pepper-potting" of social housing throughout the estate has effectively turned some areas into no-go zones and the amount of rubbish and abandoned trolleys makes the whole place look like a dump (I'm not suggesting this is just due to the social housing, some people just don't seem to care about where they live). Unsurprisingly, I didn't buy another new build when I sold that one!

We bought new build. It's six years old now. I love our house, the rooms are proportionally big for a two bed. My garden is lovely, a manageable size. The house is relatively well built, we've had no major issues.

The kitchen is the only room not really very big. Downside for us is that because the plot is on the small side and we're semi detached one side and very close to next door on the other, there is no where for us to go outwards with an extension to make the kitchen bigger. The only thing we could do would be to go up into the loft to make a third bedroom, but that wouldn't solve my kitchen issue.

We occasionally hear next door sneeze, and once heard him snoring (but we knew he was very ill at the time and presumably that was the cause of the train like rumble coming through the wall!)

I would definitely buy a new build again, but only after very careful looking at the site and plot size. Ours is city centre on brown belt and so they're close together. The developer we bought from (bellway) actually built the fewest number of houses on the site and the plots are better laid and larger than the other developers who packed them in even tighter (persimmon, miller homes and taylor wimpey)