New Build Homes are Poor Quality Buildings: Homes Rarely up to Standard, Despite the Premium Price - Our Advice for Purchasers

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Our architect sat down with a Structural Engineer and his daughter, who had recently purchased a new build with Crest Nicholson Home. Despite the house builder being rated reasonably high for quality and finishing, and commanding a premium price for their service, it sounds like the build quality for this new home was very poor, to the point whereby  plumbing fittings failed and the houses flooded through, discovered on return from honeymoon! It took 9 months and a comprehensive insurance claim for the works to be rectified, with the insurers' builders coming up trumps on the build quality.

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The average new-build home comes with 157 defects.

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If reports are correct and the average new-build house comes with 157 defects  then we are well short of the mark. With home-buyers generally borrowing to the hilt and paying an absolute premium for new homes, they should be top quality. The problem is quality control and the drive for profit. Depending upon demand, when times are good house builders set excessive build targets in unreasonable timescales, and then take deposits from purchasers and promise to hand over on these deadlines. We then only have to have a spell of bad weather, a shortage of materials or skilled labour at the time when they are required, or even a changeover of site management staff, and quality goes out of the window, short-cuts are taken, and a raft of excuses from the house builder.

If you are purchasing a new-build house, it would pay to employ a qualified surveyor to carry out regular inspections on your plot throughout the build process in order to ensure you end up with the quality you expect. The House builders will say that this is provided by the warranty providers (NHBC/LABC etc) but they are under similar pressures, and sadly the industry tends to accept a percentage of claims for poor quality will come forward and just accommodates this within its costs, a sad reflection upon the whole process.

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