Those choosing new-build homes, lured by the low running costs and high specifications, may believe they have chosen the safe option. But recent research shows there is a high chance they will move into a home riddled with defects, or snags, potentially costing them a fortune to put right. The problem has steadily been getting worse. The first National Customer Satisfaction Survey carried out in 2001 by the Housing Forum showed that 81% of homes had defects compared with 93% in 2006.

New homes finished in the first half of 2005 have an average of 80 defects per property – up over 50% on 2004, and this at a time when some large house builders are announcing vast profits for the first half of 2005 (in excess of £39,000 per home).

This is according to academics at the School of the Built and Natural Environment at Glasgow Caledonian University in conjunction with a home inspection firm who recently released the first ever research paper on snagging defects in new homes, highlighting the decreasing standards of new build housing in the UK.

The data was taken from snagging inspections carried out by Inspector Home over the past four years, which was then analysed by the University. The performance of new homes, the design of new homes, the materials used in new homes and most importantly workmanship issues have all been examined in considerable detail.

Snagging – making a snag list – is the building industry term for the process of finding and fixing all those niggling little (and sometimes not so little) things that go wrong during the building process. Issues always occur with every property built and the best builders will always include a snagging process to catch these items and fix them. Unfortunately even the finest builders don’t seem to get it right, and the recent survey show that the problem is growing. These days the word snagging is more often used to describe just the finding and listing of the snag list.

Initial analysis of over 100,000 defects indicates that snagging levels in Scotland, the South East & the South Midlands are significantly worse than homes in the rest of the UK.

London had the fewest defects per home with an average of 47, however these figures could reflect the smaller size of properties built in the Capital.

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We had a new extension built onto our home 9 months ago by a company called Young and Brolley in Glasgow. They are unreliable and shoddy in their finishing !!

After our new toilet became blocked we were informed that the toilet that we had bought and they had plumbed in was only suitable for urinating !! They had installed it wrongly !

Our attic conversion was completed using the wrong materials and the insulation was left incomplete.

Our new deck has been built without sufficient supports and will have to be strengthened !!

The new floors are uneven and their are broken tiles on our brand new roof !!

apart from that everything is dandy !!

Young and Brolley, remember that name and be afraid, very afraid !!!

How to deal with tricky situations. This week: a buyer is put off buying new-build homes for life.

Andrew Sutherland vowed never to choose another new-build home after a two-bedroom property he bought six years ago produced 18 defects. But his resolve broke when he found himself looking again at new developments along the South Coast. “I had been living in a Victorian house in Brighton, which I loved, but I wanted to move area and my partner was very keen on new build,” he says.

They searched for a house through Westbury Homes and were persuaded by a sales person to look at a three-storey town house at Bramley Green in Angmering, West Sussex.

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