As the NHBC publish the 2013 Quality Award winners its another successful year for Barratt and a disaster for Persimmon Homes

The NHBC has just announced the winners of their 2013 Pride in the Job Quality Awards. From around 13,000 site managers, just 400 won Quality Awards, being short-listed to go forward to the next round, the Seal of Excellence awards. 

The NHBC’s Pride in the Job Awards has now been running for 32 years, and continues to recognise the UK’s best site managers, building better quality new homes on well-managed sites. The NHBC confirm that “a Pride in the Job award is the highest industry accolade a site manager can receive, most importantly, homeowners who buy a Pride in the Job award-winning home benefit from a high quality product” 

You would think that given the prestige and recognition of quality construction that every house builder would be actively striving to improve quality to win as many awards as they can. But you would be wrong. Unfortunately, year on year many of Britain’s largest house builders pay little more than lip-service to improving the quality of their product and this is reflected in the low number of NHBC Quality Awards they win each year. Our sister website, brand-newhomes.co.uk, publishes league tables for the awards every year, in addition to listing the number of homes each builder actually builds per Quality Award won. 

Whilst Barratt, which includes David Wilson Homes, over the last six years increased their share of awards every year, winning 96 Quality Awards in 2013 up 31% on their total last year, most of the other national listed house builders Taylor Wimpey excepted, win significantly few awards. Especially considering the number of sites they have and the total number of new homes they build each year. 

Whether it is housing boom or a period of recession would appear to have any effect as the number of awards won each year is mostly near the average over the last six years. 

However whilst most house builders win a similar percentage of the total awards to their percentage of the national total of new homes built last year, one house builder bucks the trend, Persimmon Homes. 

In 2013, Persimmon site managers won just nine NHBC Pride in the Job Quality Awards with a further four being won by subsidiary Charles Church. This represents just 3.2% of the total NHBC Quality Awards in 2013, from a company that built 8.5% of the nation’s new homes last year. Worse still, this years total is a massive fall of 38% on the meagre total of 21 Quality Awards Persimmon’s site managers won last year. 

You would think that new home buyers would be mindful of quality when deciding which builder to buy a new home from. However, despite their lack of Quality Awards, Persimmon have managed to increase the number of homes they sold, with profits up by 52% in 2012, due in part to a 6% uplift in the average selling price of their homes. 

To put this into perspective, new home buyers are nearly six times more likely to buy a Quality Award winning home from Barratt than they are from Persimmon. In addition Barratt have been rated 5 stars in the HBF customer satisfaction survey for the last four years, whereas Persimmon have only ever achieved a 4 star rating. 

With the new home industry ever keen to dispel the terrible reputation it has for building new homes riddled with preventable defects, it is surprising that these benchmarks of quality are not considered more by every prospective new home buyer. At the end of the day there is a choice and as the table below indicates you have a better chance of a quality buying a Barratt home than you do buying Persimmon, which may not have been the case ten years ago.

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