Building with Kurmond Homes

they said same thing to us.
hopefully that's going to be the case.

Someone must being putting a cracker under them, we had a two month gap between our external colour appointment and the having the DA documents sent for our approval.

We received our CC pack three weeks ago and silence since then. No one is falling over themselves to get our file through.

amegilla, have to contacted them since?
they started showing signs of life only when I sent them formal notice that I was about to go to Fair Trading.

It is strange that they didn't send you draft contract.
We have the same estimated commence of construction dates so I would think they should have sent you draft contract.
They will only commence the construction within 4 weeks after you sign the contract so you don't have much time.

We haven't signed the contract yet as we are waiting for our bank to get us approval letter.

We will need to reapply for finance, I think, it’s been such a long wait since we got pre-approval, and we still don’t have the final costing.

They told us they would be in touch, to quote “Your job is allocated for construction to commence end April 2018 and over the next few weeks we will advise you of anything you need to attend to in order for us to complete the Final Construction plans, Final tender and Contract.”

Go figure. I’ve given up trying to understand their processes. No doubt they will send it out to us when we are away for the holidays and tell us we need to hurry because this is holding up our job. It seems to be how they work.

Updates: Construction Stage | BRICKS

8 Feb 2018: Bricks arrived on site

15 Feb 2018: Bricklayers started working
3 Mar 2018: Bricklayer has finished 75% of brick works and stopped working because they were running out of bricks 1st time(Kurmond Homes Estimating team have NOT ORDERED ENOUGH bricks)

5 Mar - 20 Mar: DELAYED

21 Mar 2018: Bricklayers back on site to finish rest of 25% brick works - it was 1-2 days works left (instructed by bricklayers)!
23 Mar 2018: DELAYED - Brick work would be FINISHED (it was supervisor's wording)
29 Mar 2018: Bricklayers have managed to finished 20% of brick work and stopped working because they were running out of bricks 2nd time (Kurmond Homes Estimating team have NOT ORDERED ENOUGH bricks)

6 Apr 2018: Expecting more bricks to arrived on site

11 Apr 2018: Expecting Bricklayer to start/finish rest of 5% brick works

I'll KEEP YOU POSTED.

hi guys,

just update you on our build.

Kurmond of course failed to do what they promised. they just sent us final plans this week. with many mistakes of course.
Before that for the last 3 weeks we were contacting them to find out what was going on and they gave us the same liеs "plans are ready, they just need checks".
anyway they managed to exclude things that we earlier agreed on and signed variations for.
I cannot believe those people.

I spoke to "lovely" operational manager Terry Boss (name changed) today and she confirmed that they will not commence building in April as promised. She of course mentioned that it is all our fault... as usual.
When I told her that they were not doing anything for a few months she just told me "let's not argue because it is Friday afternoon".


Anyway, commencement of our construction is again postponed because Kurmond just doesn't do anything for weeks and weeks.
We just don't know what to do anymore....

hey 1building,
how is your build?

Surprisingly things were going great/on track but as we all know now Kurmond Homes doesn't like to be so good & dont belive in tl provide a great efficient services to their clients)...

Our brick work just finish! It took 7 WEEKs... which is too long!!

Fact:

As per supervisors (previous n current) & bricklaying people brick work should take MAX 3 weeks!

Issue:

During bricks work bricklaying team were running out of bricks TWO TIMES due to Kurmonds estimating team's miscalculation - they havent ordered ENOUGH BRICKS...

IT IS NOT UNBELIEVABLE BECAUSE IT IS KURMOND HOMES!!!

[quote="1building"]Updates: Construction Stage | BRICKS

8 Feb 2018: Bricks arrived on site

15 Feb 2018: Bricklayers started working
3 Mar 2018: Bricklayer has finished 75% of brick works and stopped working because they were running out of bricks 1st time(Kurmond Homes Estimating team have NOT ORDERED ENOUGH bricks)

5 Mar - 20 Mar: DELAYED

21 Mar 2018: Bricklayers back on site to finish rest of 25% brick works - it was 1-2 days works left (instructed by bricklayers)!
23 Mar 2018: DELAYED - Brick work would be FINISHED (it was supervisor's wording)
29 Mar 2018: Bricklayers have managed to finished 20% of brick work and stopped working because they were running out of bricks 2nd time (Kurmond Homes Estimating team have NOT ORDERED ENOUGH bricks)

6 Apr 2018: Expecting more bricks to arrived on site

11 Apr 2018: Expecting Bricklayer to start/finish rest of 5% brick works

I'll KEEP YOU POSTED.

13 Apr 2018: BRICK work FINISHED!

just an update,

we signed the contract this week and now Kurmond told us that they need 2 weeks to get HBCF. After that we will prepare banks formal letter and only then the 4 weeks that Kurmond has to commence the construction will begin.

So what Kurmond called April commencement just a month ago will end up to be June-July commencement....
They also made us pay extra for HBCF insurance which using the HBCF calculator in icare.gov.au looks very excessive.

Same with us...

I am still not getting their strategy/practice to work in this way!

As they being profession - they are handling multiple project and how come they dont know 2 weeks before that they will need HBCF certificate for this client ( who have already waiting so long long)...

Why this 2 weeks wait now!!! Seriously frustrating and stressful with those people...

We have paid extra too for HBCF ...

Kurmond doesn't know the meaning of word "COMMITMENT(S)"...

Does anyone know when KH do outside Cladding?

Our bricks are finished.. !

Good Morning all,

Long time reader, fist time poster. I bought an unregistered block of land and decided I liked the Bronte 32 floor plan offered by Kurmond at the time...

April 2017- Signed Tender
May 2017 - External appointments, Internal appts 2 weeks later
June 2017- Subcontrator appointments - Tiles, sentinel alarms etc. (Yes I did these AFTER internal appointments... don't even get me started)
August - Kurmond completed the site survey
October 2017- Land registered
November - I got my plans with my house sited on the block.. they pushed the house to the back of the block and we lost about 2m of backyard space. No one told us of the change, they just send the plans and asked us to sign. There was a 2 month saga over the location of the house, so now we have a split level home.

December 17 - Lodged with council on the last day of work for December.
8th Feb 2018- Council approval received. (oh, and they told me they wouldn't look at the digital copy of the approval, they had to wait an extra week to get the hard copy from council....)

Feb 2018 - Told we would start construction in APRIL ....
6th of April - Construction Certificate (why it took 2 months for a construction certificate I don't know).

Today ---- I still don't have a contract... so.... apparently my drawings are now out of drafting (why they are STILL with drafting beats me..).


I still can't even get a start date out of these people... Pretty fed up at this point.
I signed with them while we were unregistered so we would be ready. Well, there's people in my newly released estate with bricks up and internal fit outs done....


nada17 - I also had the same problem with the HCBF price increase. I entered all my details into the Icare website and screen shotted it back to them, they were trying to charge me $880 over and above the cost (mind you they apparently have a 30% premium on all of their insurances...) I managed to get the extra charge waived. I signed my tender 2 days AFTER this legislation came into effect that increased the prices... 12 months ago. And they only JUST told me about it.

I think they are just trying to get more money from you this way or another.

I will anyway request an invoice from the broker and see how much they overcharged me.
I think they cannot have any "premiums" as they are not a licensed broker.

I sent them an e-mail about the insurance and they replied last Friday "The application has been submitted and the review completed and it is now with the broker to issue the invoice and certificate. Hoping to receive early next week".
It is Tuesday afternoon and no insurance at all.

If anyone knows who is their HCBF broker, please let me know. I want to dig further. I am sure that they are deliberately delaying everything.

An again, for people who are considering building with Kurmond: do not fall for their promises. sales people have no idea what they are talking about. the head office will charge for things which you already signed variations. they will also delay everything trying to fit you to their busy and understaffed schedule. They don't care that you are just losing money every week.
They will offer you $5 for each working day of delays in construction which is something like $100 each months they delay.
Of course they are not going to pay for months and months of delays during the pre-construction stage.
So basically they are not responsible for meeting any deadlines. They just don't care.

I had the EXACT same thing happen!
My colour consultant recommended to move the mixers, which I thought was a great idea... then she got fired and my NEW colour consultant was like 'oh but you have to pay $110 for that'. We paid it grudgingly.

And every time I get a new copy of my drawings my laundry sink changes position... EVERY TIME. I have a galley laundry with room for benches on both sides (that i will be getting put in after handover, because 10k for a laundry fitout was excessive).

They don't make any notes about what they change on drawings at all.
I found a really good tool, it's a PDF program called Bluebeam. If you can make use of the free trial then you can actually overlay 2 pages on top of each other, so you can see exactly what doesn't line up with the previous revision.

I caught them out on shrinking my hallway by 100mm, moving my laundry sink, moving the location of the house, changing wall thickness.

Yes,

Everything is a delay with them, I haven't been able to pin them down on dates for ANYTHING.

So my longest/stupidest delay..
I had my internal appointment in MAY 2017.
My colour file was finalised in MARCH 2018 ...

10 months...

I cannot even express the amount of stupidity I have dealt with. I was one of the 30 clients that got screwed over by a colour consultant who didn't know what she was doing, or was doing things wrong or who knows.
I thought that would have put me in a better position now because I thought they may have tried to make up for it. But no..

10 and a half weeks after council approval I don't have a contract..

Worst thing is, i have some competitive friends who bought in the same estate... Their 2 story house now has bricks... and I still have weeds..


What designs has everyone gone with??

our colour was in October 2017 and the file was closed in March 2018.
and we also dealt with lovely Kristie (name changed) ............... which promised us to come back with our colours within 2 weeks after the appointment and when we called after 2 weeks we found out that she doesn't work there anymore. and there 4+ months of silence...

we also have neighbours who got registered at the same time - and 2 weeks ago they had their bricks finished.
if anyone is interested, they build with "new living homes". I cannot say much about them, I just see that they are probably 4-5 months ahead Kurmond.

we are building Claremont 23 - it is a small double storey as our lot is very tiny.

By the way, we always send them Bluebeam sketches as comments. my partner and I are both in design/construction industry so we usually know what we are talking about when commenting. We always try to make their like easier giving them all the needed info because coordination of projects with other consultants is part of our daily tasks.
I have never dealt with such unprofessional people in my life.

Wow,
Me too, I'm a project coordinator in the construction industry.

Unfortunately sending them sketches in bluebeam doesn't help... I tried...I drew them a sketch of what my alfresco cabinets should have looked like... 4 revisions later and it's still not right. For the first 3 revisions I had a full height refrigerator (instead of an underbench bar fridge hole). Now i have a hole for it, with no bench.. so.. progress?

I had my appointment in May with KB, and she didn't leave until Oct/Nov... and my file still hadn't been sorted by the time she left.
As far as I know she didn't even send my amendments to the drafting department at all, because when I got assigned a new person it hadn't been done yet.

I even had argued with KB for about 2 months over whether I had fly screens on my alfresco doors.
Oh, and I had to call all the external suppliers myself and book my appointments AFTER my internal appointment, because she booked in my internal appointment, and till hadn't even emailed my file to the suppliers.

So, probably no great loss there that she didn't work on your file.

Although the replacement wasn't any faster... I didn't get any documents from her until FEB.