Buyers beware!
Following Persimmon being featured on BBC Watchdog and in my view let off lightly, last month, the BBC Watchdog office has been contacted by hundreds of disgruntled Persimmon new home buyers from as many as sixty different developments across the country with their experiences of unfinished homes, defects and poor customer care. See the Persimmon BBC Watchdog clip here
Homes not finished
On couple featured on last nights programme were Charlotte and Ashley Read who bought a new home on Persimmon’s Waters Edge estate in Cheshire. When they were handed the keys to their brand new £190,000 new home they found:
“it looked like a half finished house. Everything was a mess there were things incomplete, no rainwater pipes” causing damp and mould inside our home. I couldn’t believe we paid money for this, it was disgusting”
It took Persimmon THREE MONTHS to finally “sort everything out”
Other new home buyers also found Persimmon’s contractors still working in their homes when they came to move in – “the house wasn’t finished but Persimmon had declared it to be ready and taken their money anyway.”
The CML final certification was brought in to prevent housebuilders handing over unfinished new homes. The Council for Mortgage Lenders initiative requires this completion certificate, along with confirmation that the new home warranty is in place, before they release the mortgage funds. So how and why can a new home be signed off by a supposedly independent Building Inspector, quite often the NHBC, when clearly it anything but complete? How can the “inspectors,” the site manager and everyone else, miss something as obvious and quick and easy to fit as no rainwater downpipes?
The CML final inspection should to be made 14 days before the legal completion date. This is to give the solicitors and mortgage provider a minimum “14 days notice” to arrange for the funds and also would provide new home buyers with an opportunity to properly inspect their “finished home.” How is this notice period being avoided by Persimmon (and other housebuilders) especially in the weeks and days before their financial year end cut-off date?
Not one was able to demonstrate he cared about the quality of the homes built on his site. Not one possessed the “wide range of site management skills from technical knowledge and consistency in the build process to leadership and organisational skills, and achieving the highest possible standards and best practice in house building” that the NHBC judges were looking for.
The Building Research Establishment (BRE) is introducing a national quality mark for new housing that it claims should give home buyers and renters a clear indication of the quality and performance of a new home.
