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 nature of the lake, planning permission was granted for a modern housing estate to be built on a tip next to the poisoned body of water in 2003.

Last night one worried father, whose house sits on the edge of the toxic mere, said: “We feel we have been lied to by everyone, and everybody round here is very angry about it.

“At no stage did Barratt homes tell us anything about what was buried in that lake and when we came to visit there were no hazardous waste signs on the main gate as there are now.

“Not only do we face financial ruin because we will never be able to sell the house, but our garden literally backs onto the lake so we are terrified for the health of our young children.”

Read more about the poisonous lake

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. However, the one that causes the most problems with residents is the lack of parking. Visit any new build estate at the weekend when everybody is at home and people are entertaining visitors you will see what I mean.

I read this article earlier about a Barratt Homes estate where the residents are putting “polite notices” on cars stating that the road is private so visitors cannot park there. Although this is technically correct, it would be private for long and once the council has adopted it anybody can park there.

Here is the article:

]Estate agents Whitton and Laing have waded in over a row over parking at Norman Crescent.

Recently residents were being warned off becoming vigilante traffic wardens by cops after two drivers found notes on their parked cars saying the road was private.

Read more about this parking problem.

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 and end up out of pocket because of completion delays.

However, Clare now has to wait till 31/03 (I assume that is this year) and that is only a rough estimate!

Anyway, Clare has been to the press and you can find her story here:

A north-east woman is still waiting for the keys to her new home – three months after she was due to move in.

Clare Davidson bought the “luxury” one-bedroom Bett Homes (formerly Gladedale) flat near Newmachar for £153,000 last year.

A day before she was due to move in, on October 23, she was told the date would be pushed back by a week.

A few days later, the developer said there had been a leak in the property, located in the former Kingseat Hospital building.

Read more

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 advertising and marketing benefits it gets from these unsightly adverts that they plastered all lampposts around the Bolton estate. As it is not the first time the builder has been fined for fly posting.

Their scant regard for the law in this area does make you wonder about their attitude to the law in other areas such as the building regulations. Quite a scary thought really.

Read more about it in the Bolton Evening News:

A PROPERTY developer has been fined £5,400 and ordered to pay £1,190 costs for illegally fly posting on lampposts in Bolton.

Bolton Council brought the case against Barratt Manchester Ltd which trades as Barratt Homes.

The company pleaded guilty to nine offences of displaying unlawful advertisements during a hearing at Bolton Magistrates Court on Tuesday.

The developer was fined £600 for each offence under Section 224 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990.

Court fines property firm £5,400 for illegal posters

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 an ironic name). Anyway, they are quoted in the article as saying that often when testing takes palce as a result of a complaint to the NHBC the homes meet standard the home owners are still not happy. Quite offensive really – they are basically saying that there poor souls are just whingeing.

Anyway, read it for yourself:

Home insulation has become big business, thanks to grants inspired by the Government’s carbon emission reduction target. But never mind heat insulation, Trevor and Elaine New want to know what has happened to the sound insulation in their flat in Pendlebury, Greater Manchester.

Their joy in picking up a flat at Bryant Homes’ development Joule Point for £110,000 at the bottom of the housing slump in October 2008 has been somewhat tempered by the regular pounding of footsteps upstairs.

‘I have no complaint against the neighbours, who are just going about their normal business, but I don’t think we should be able to hear them in our flat,’ says Trevor, 58, who works in the construction industry himself as a health-and-safety adviser.

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 treat snow and ice on it.

During the run up to Christmas when conditions were particularly treacherous, some residents were simply unable to get their cars up the steep brae to their houses. It is reported that some have spun on the ice.

This story is about Balmossie Green, a Stewart Milne Homes development. You can read more about Stewart Milne in the forums.

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 a few meters from his front door – lay an old, disused mining shaft (which isn’t surprising really because it’s completely invisible to the naked eye). The company that built the house, however, knew all about it – they just didn’t tell David.

David paid 100,000 pounds to Taylor Wimpey for his brand new home in County Durham in 2002. The area has a strong mining heritage, yet the mines search David carried out before buying the property revealed no mineshafts directly affecting his future home. He says that it was only during a casual conversation with the site manager – after he’d bought the house – that David first learned what lurked under his drive.

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 of flats which should have been sorted out within days were still a problem.

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 13 included a gas pipe not capped off, electrical points without covers, a dishwasher not plumbed in, a fridge not delivered and the whole house needing cleaning before the furniture could be moved in.

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 will be formally offered a free place on a degree course at private London law school BPP.