From the category archives:

New Homes News

Barratt Homes Posionous Lake Complaint

This story highlights the fact that the house builders will build absolutely anywhere. Extreme care needs to be taken when buying new homes on these so-called brown field sites. You really need to do your homework to find out what that land was used for.
Amazingly, even though the authorities knew about the [...]

New Home Parking Problems

New home developers hire specialist planning consultants and designers that aim to maximise the profitability of every planned development by ensuring that the housing density is a high as possible. This impacts on many aspects of a development that make living there more enjoyable such as open spaces, play areas and the like. [...]

Bett Homes Completion Delays

Or is that Gladedale… Snagging forum member  Clare was due to move into her new house on 23/10/09 and the day before, yes the day before, she was told it would be another week.  Well that in itself is not unusual. Many new build buyers are let down time and time again by the builders [...]

Barratt Homes Fined for Ignoring the Law

Bolton Council has successfully taken action against Barratt Homes who have been fined £5,400 for flyposting in the Bolton area. The builder was given ample opportunity to take down the illegal posters but failed resulting in the local council taking action.
Obviously, the builder sees this fine as being insignificant compared to the [...]

Noisy Bryant Homes Flats

The Daily Mail has an article today about widespread problems with poor sound insulation in new build homes. What do you expect when there is no standards and homes simply have to adhere to a set of theoretical standards managed by a company called Robust Details Ltd (I think that must be [...]

Barratt Homes Fraud

A sales boss of building giants Barratt has been sacked after a fraud probe.
The investigation was launched after a whistle-blower claimed family and friends of executives were buying homes at knockdown prices before selling them for massive profits.
West of Scotland sales and marketing director Stuart MacColl, 41, has been fired, while managing director in [...]

Road Adoption Problems

One downside of a brand new house is that the access road to it may not have been adopted by the local council.
And as residents of the Balmossie Green development off the A92 opposite Panmurefield Village have found, if that road is on a hill, there may be no-one who has the legal responsibility to [...]

Taylor Wimpey Shafted

With the property market in the doldrums, millions of us are wondering if our home is the secure investment it once was. But for David Robinson, there was a much more unusual reason to be worried.
When he first moved in to his new house, David had no idea that beneath his drive – and only [...]

Ignored by Taylor Wimpey

An Earley first-time buyer is still battling with the builders after moving into her new home at the end of June.
Emma Kinghorn bought a £160,000 flat in a Taylor Wimpey development in Regis Park Road and is beginning to wish she had not.
Miss Kinghorn, operations manager at a leisure centre, said snags at the block [...]

You’d expect more for £440,000

Gavin Henderson had been commuting for almost a year from Newcastle – longing to move into his new house down south.
But when he and wife Susan arrived at their new £440,000 Taylor Wimpey home in Padworth two months ago they began to discover a catalogue of 160 alarming faults.
Early shocks when they arrived on October [...]

Bellway Homes Beaten

A beautician who defeated one of the UK’s biggest homebuilders at the High Court has been given a £10,000 scholarship to study law.
Georgina Blackwell represented her mum without any legal training because they could not afford a lawyer and won the case against Bellway Homes in a dispute over access to their garden.
Today the 23-year-old [...]

Shoddy house builders blasted by Selby residents

RESIDENTS of a new Barratt estate claim the house-builder has gone against planning approval for their homes to save cash.
Paula Walter and John Davies (above), backed by other residents of The Haven, claim Barratt Homes promoted 37 top-of-the-range Selsdon properties for sale after being granted planning permission for the house type but actually built bottom-of-the-range [...]

Obsessed with house prices, we ignore the cost of lives spent in shoddy homes

For one of the world’s more mobile populations, Britain has collectively hit something of a brick wall during this recession. Shortly before the economic balloon went pop, in July 2007, you may remember that Gordon Brown announced a plan to ensure that three million new houses would be built by 2020, thereby preventing another unsustainable [...]

New homes are too small for everyday life, say residents

Forty four per cent of all households surveyed say they do not have enough space for small children to play safely in the kitchen while meals are being prepared, and 37 per cent say they or their children do not have enough space to entertain guests privately.
Seventy two per cent do not have enough space [...]

OFT to Recommend Statutory Redress Scheme

The OFT continues to be supportive of industry efforts to implement a code and will continue to work with the code body and stands ready to advise on request.
The market study set out a timetable of milestones and deadlines with the purpose of ensuring progress, against the background of previous reports and recommendations about the [...]

Blog about your new build experiences

Newhomeblogs.co.uk our sister site has been much unloved over that last few months, so we have given it some tender loving care and are now looking for new bloggers. If you are buying a new build home and would like to blog about your experiences then head over the new home blogs. We [...]

Consumer Code for Home Builders

Zurich was an original signatory to the industry’s proposal to form an industry code to deal with the issues raised in the market study report.
As agreed between the OFT and the industry, the proposal for the homebuilding code envisaged that the code would have provided the ‘established means’ for the control of unfair commercial practice [...]

Wimpey’s ‘bad workmanship’ on new-build

Mr Willey, who works in the building trade, decided to put up the warning after three years of complaining about the four-bedroom property which he moved into in June 2006.
He said: ‘I would’t wish on anyone what I’ve had to go through. It’s a lot of money to spend and you expect a new house [...]

Residents threaten legal action against Persimmon Homes

In a recent incident, workers cut through a water main and flooded the road and residents say they’ve not received so much as an apology.
One woman seeking legal advice, who didn’t want to be named, said: “They don’t seem to give a damn. It was like a river in Gaston Way and the water flowed [...]

New Build Heating Problems

Heating problems are common in many new build homes. Read this on the Montgomerie Park Residents’ Association Site and find the results of their poll:
“Anyone on the Persimmon estate (or any of the others) have an issue with the heating of their property? I have been having a bit of a debate with builder over [...]