Boutique Homes

Sorry heat up

Thanks Guys, yes we have the same issue with it taking a while to heat up.. I understand that as it does have to travel far from the water tank to the ensuite, but after it heats up nice and hot, it goes cold within a couple of minutes and that lasts for at least a minute before going hot again.. and just keeps going like that..

It's ok.. Maybe it is just ours then.. I just think when we have kids and they want a shower that isn't as high pressure, how can we work around it. I just don't think its a good enough work around that Boutique wants us to do..

Yea sounds like it could be just ures il have one on low pressure tomorrow and let you know if it does it in our ensuite toom

Thank you PetaJ appreciate that

Hey everyone,

So we've hit yet another snag with our build

Our bank (Westpac) has undervalued our house and land by $34k!!

Has this happened to anyone else? does anyone know what I can do? I'm freaking out right now.

Hi jp79
Yes this happened to us. Ours was like 50k including land and house with a lower value. Did you go through resolve? Well they helped us out with going through bluebay home loans and all went through fine. Plus their customer service and rate were so much better than the big banks. Your broker should be able to help with this. Good luck

We had exactly the same $50k..
Went through Resolve too...Simeon is an absolutely champion. CBA finally came to the party and eventually valued our land to what we paid for..thank god. Understand the stress and there were tears too.

Ohhhh....thanks so much guys. We were using Westpac and was considering trying Resolve now. Looks like it might be the way to go.

Will give them a call. Thanks so much for the advice

Jp79 please request for Simeon to help you. Amazing customer service and tell him Shelley and Jeremy recommended him.

Will do, thanks!

Hi JP79,

Here is a complete different story on Resolve finance. We approached them even before signing our PWC. Met a guy (he no more works with Resolve) who advised us based on our financial situation all good. This was 6 months before we applied for our loan & land settlement. He applied home loan with CBA almost 3 months before the land settlement. We got $50K short in valuation. Our troubles started from here. He then wasted our 2 months doing nothing on the valuation. We had to push him for everything. He then applied with Bluebay whose valuation came out the same as CBA. We now had about 3 weeks for our settlement. He just did nothing to help us. Dint approach other banks. We then changed the broker went with another independent broker who is awesome.

This guys got a pre-valuation before even approaching a bank from companies who he knew wouldn't under value properties so much. So the valuation came out with smaller shortfall which we always expected & were prepared for.

Westpac also undervalued our property by $70K. We then settled with ANZ.

Because the Resolve guy wasted our valuable time we were left with less than a week to settle. It was such a nightmare as we were close to Christmas period. The developer gave an extension from 19th December 2014 till 24th and we settled on 24th which was the last day we had. We only had to settle with land at that point as ANZ only lends 90%. We then were forced to postpone construction for 5 months till June 2015. Boutique were really good as they did not charge us extra since we are building after 6 months of signing PWC and the base price of the house has gone up as well.

Boutique has been very good for us. I don't want to blame the whole Resolve company because of one idiot but make sure you are on top of everything & follow things up no matter whom you deal with.

Thanks for the feedback sanjaybasavaraj, it's all appreciated. I actually dealt with another bloke from Resolve about 12 months ago also. I reckon it was probably the same fellow as he wasn't easy to deal with and no longer works there.

I contacted Simeon from Resolve yesterday and I sent him all of our details today. Fingers crossed he can help us.

I'll let you all know how we go

Update on our progress.

Our land was delayed again and is now due to title in Sep this year. After originally being told it would title in Jan then March and June.

Boutique wanted to charge us an extra 10K for our house stating the price would go up by that much by the time they could commence construction of there was no further delays.
As you can imagine we said no. This all happened at the start of March we had been ignored and our calls and emails not answered by anyone except our fantastic pre start consultant who has been fantastic through this whole process.

Our whole point was it would be cheaper for us to cancel and then resign up then pay the 10K.
Yesterday we had a meeting with Boutique at the Docklands.
They apologised for the lack of communication from anyone. Said they had let us down and could understand why we where now feeling apprehensive moving forward due to lack of communication from anyone.

They have now said we can resign a new PWC with the house price adjusted to today's current price for the house and would honour everything else in our PWC and the pricing for that.
Meaning we are up for an extra $5800 but that would hold the price for 6 months after our land titles. So approx March next year.
They are going to contact the developer again asking for engineering report for site costs to confirm that amount is still 10k and no more.

Has anyone dealt with significant changes to their fixed site costs?

Hi baneshouse. I was very particular about the wording in the pwc regarding the fixed costs. Boutique actually changed the wording in our contract to remove any changeable costs to the fixed site costs. My argument was that they sold us as a 'fixed' cost. As far as I was concerned, fixed costs are fixed assuming the works don't change. I even quoted our sales guy to get them to change it.

My thoughts would be, same house, no structural changes, it is their risk for under / over quoting. That said, if you add a pool, or change your block of land, the fixed costs can change as the brief changes. You are spending a lot of money, if they sell you a fixed cost item, you should not accept any changes, like I said before, it is boutiques risk of under quoting. That said, if the block of land changes, I would think the whole contract would need to be renegotiated....

Hi again everyone,

We settled on our block of land in March; unfortunately at the time, we didn't have an HIA contract ready.

Now it's June and we have a contract signed, however as you know, our bank undervalued our house. We've shopped around and have now been told by another broker that no other lender will re-finance the mortgage on our land until we've had at least 6 months re-payment history. So our choices are currently:

1. Take Westpacs undervaluation
2. Wait another 4 months until we have 6 month history, then we can shop around

Has anyone ever heard of this before? My other broker has never heard this before.

Hi everyone, finally after all the struggle with the loan (almost lost our land) our house construction is starting today. We are so excited!!!

Can you guys please suggest a good inspection company? Thanks.

@JP79: Our land+house was undervalued by both CBA & Westpac but we then approached ANZ with a pre-valuation which ANZ was happy about & got the loan done. Never heard of this before.

Congrats sanjay
Best on we found out was
DARBECCA PTY LTD
( Darren love , & brett)call the following number if u wish
0419 224 440

They are very good and very proffessional and found a lot during inspection which we don't think of. Some Minor which can be ignored but some major and needed to be fixed.

Thanks Sanjay,

Did you already have a loan on your land only and then added the construction later?

Apparently our issue is because we already have a land loan and now (less than 6 months later) we're trying to find a different lender to re-finance our land loan and add the construction.

Congrats sanjaybasavaraj on the start, watching the house go up is very exciting!

Jp79, I'd look into the 'mid tier' banks as they are more flexible with finance etc and would be more likely to want your business. ( bank of Melbourne, CUA, Bendigo bank, etc...). I think the 6 month statement is a laziness part of the banks as it is hard for the big banks to do all your paperwork registering and then transferred in 6 months.

A friend of ours just sold their house after refinancing 2 months prior. Their settlements was delayed almost 2 weeks because the paperwork hadn't been finalised from the original transaction. They ended up getting the bank manager involved and it was sorted.

Did you have any luck with resolve, surely boutiques own finance coy won't under value their builds.....?

Hi Szep,

It was the broker at Resolve that has told us about the 6 month issue. He hasn't bothered to get other valuations for this reason.

Back to shopping around.