One of the biggest decisions of your life will be building a new home. While this is an exciting time brimming with possibilities, it’s important to not get drawn in by what may seem easy building solutions at glamorous display homes.
While project home builders have large extensive operations with beautiful display homes, before you embark on your building journey, you need to be aware of all the factors that are involved.
Here at Vogue Homes, we’re passionate about looking after the interests of our customers.
We’ve put together this blog to go through some of the details involved with large project builders to help you assess whether this building option is the right fit for you.
Customer Experience Throughout Your Build Journey
When assessing customer experience, it’s important to factor in the whole building journey. That is, not only the initial sale, but all the interactions throughout the construction, and the level of attention provided.
Project builders work at a large scale of operations, meaning they concentrate on volume, producing hundreds or even thousands of homes in a single calendar year. Since they are focused on volume, they have very good front-of-house customer service. Initially, they will give you a lot of attention often from a sales agent to get you over the line.
However, once you’ve signed a contract, this is often when the level of service drops. With large project builders, the majority of on-site management is conducted by supervisors, who may each be responsible for monitoring the progress of multiple building sites. They do not have the time to devote to a single project and need to move on in order to cover all of their responsibilities.
This is why often the common feedback that comes back when dealing with large project builders, is that customers are no longer seen as individuals, but rather as site numbers in a queue, particularly if more lucrative public housing commercial jobs require attention, it’s easy to fall even further behind in priority if you are an individual.
Higher Exposure To Macro-Economic Instabilities and Risks
With such large operations project builders are able to use their purchasing power and successfully leverage economies of scale. However, having an increasing footprint in the market also makes them more susceptible to changes in the macro-environment.
As we’ve recently seen, today’s market can be quite volatile. Not only have we been hit by the prolonged effects of a pandemic, but there seems to be an endless supply of unexpected events.
Rapidly rising construction costs, global supply issues due to the effects of inflation, increased tariffs, shortages in the skilled labour market and forecasted interest rate rises are factors that contribute to instability and the financial risk to which a large builder is exposed.
In an environment such as this, it’s imperative to go for a builder who has the final surety to meet all its Home Warranty Insurance commitments. In NSW this type of insurance is required for any builders who undertake residential building contracts valued at $20,000 or more.
It can provide cover to a homeowner in cases where contracted building work isn’t completed, or the builder is unable to fix defects. This could be due to unforeseen circumstances such as the death, disappearance or insolvency of a builder.
Flexibility and Adaptability To Adjust To Your Requirements
Project builders are known for producing standardised floor plans which are intended to suit the majority of family households. While this may be an appropriate option if you’re after a standard run-of-the-mill design to enter the market, the reality is that people’s lifestyles and preferences are highly individual, and as such require a more customised approach to suit their particular needs.
Unfortunately, large project builders lack the flexibility and adaptability to adjust to your unique requirements. Since their model is based on achieving economies of scale through standardised designs and the large turnover of repetitive home projects, they cannot efficiently factor in variations or personalised adjustments. With a project builder, any such requested changes will often involve the charge of significant fees.
Selecting a builder to build your home is often a once-in-a-lifetime decision. Before making such a momentous decision, it’s important that you’re fully informed as to all the applicable factors. While project builders have the biggest profile and seem to offer big brand safety, the sting can often be in the tail.
Large project builders take on a huge volume of construction projects and are focused on sales to maintain economies of scale. While they may provide you with a lot of initial attention to get your deposit, the level of customer service often drops with constrained site management and low priority compared to more lucrative projects.
If you’re after flexibility and high-touch customer service throughout your build process, large project builders may also not be an appropriate option as they only offer standardised home designs and do not tend to maximise the specifics of your site. Finally, in the uncertain times that we are facing, it’s important to be wary of larger players in the market who may have a large profile, but also have high exposure to negative developments in macro-economic factors.
We hope this blog has been helpful and armed you with the right information to approach your building journey. Should you require any further advice on any matters building-related, don’t hesitate to contact our experts here at Vogue Homes.
We’re a long-standing second-generation family-owned luxury home builder in Sydney and operated business with the right level of flexibility to meet your needs. We’re a big enough builder to be low risk to our customers, but still small enough to care.
When you come to us, we’ll provide you with an exceptional level of customer service and look after you throughout each step of your building journey.
For any of your building needs, why not contact us today.
