Any good or bad comments about 21st Century Homes?

Hi everyone,
My husband and I are about to build our home in the Albury/Wodonga region and we were wondering if anybody knew much about 21st Century Homes based in Albury. We were going to go with G.J. Gardner and really liked them, but the house we have been offered by 21st Cenury Homes is larger and I like the design more. When I told our consultant at G.J. Gardner of our decision, he mentioned that there were bad things about 21st Century Homes out there and there was a certain website in particular, but he couldn't remember the name of it. I think it was partly a scare tactic on his part given that he knew we were looking at 21st Century Homes as well, but he only mentioned these things when we told him that we'd chosen not to use G.J. Gardner.
We're fairly new to the area, so really don't have any experience or prior knowledge and thought we'd take a chance with them, even though we can't seem to find any good or bad review on them.
Thankyou in advance for any comments you can share!

Hi,

How did you go. I am now planning to build our home at Wodonga.

Lejo

Hey how did you guys go with 21st Century Homes?

We had a very stressful and poor experience building with 21st Century Homes. We felt like we received minimal communication during the build that took nearly 2 years and were blamed or ignored if we raised any concerns.

The building industry is one of the very few industries where builders can treat their customers like gums under their boots and completely get away with it. In the meantime, customers have to suck it up or beg and pray that the builders do the right thing. It's like paying a subscription for a service that you only get a semi-decent house of it if you're lucky. I'm sorry to hear of your poor experience and getting abused for asking questions. I too have just experienced the same.

while not an excuse to treat clients poorly, about 90% of most builder's clients are difficult, don't know a single thing about building. They waste the builders time with bazillions of questions that are irrelevant, complain about things that are in the scheme of things irrelevant and rant and rave and threaten to withold funds because they noticed a hairline crack in the cornice and now the house needs to be torn down and rebuilt.

Obviously the above is hyperbole, but the amount of times a builder has had to deal with terrible clients outweighs any other industry im aware of aswell. There are some that take it in their stride as part of the job and work to ensure their clients are on the same page throughout the build. But the reality of doing so is a huge overhead that the builder doesn't get a measurable benefit from (mostly). So like most industries, they develp ways to avoid these interactions and just get on with teh job (rightly or wrongly).

Ideally clients would become active participants in their build, do learning about the process, understand concepts, be curious about how things work etc This would greatly improve the expereinces for both builder and client in the long run. though its a chicken/egg argument.

The issue I raised is not just that builders treating client like dirt, it's that they can get away with it. The power dynastic is completely different in building industry to other in that the clients are contract bound to proceed the build in a timely manner or risk variation and price hikes or not getting a product they paid for. They are the ones shouldering the lion share of the cost and have to put up with mistakes and delays.

There are builders who takes clients money and don't pay their trade after the job, resulting the trade pulling stuff out from homes. When these builders go under, many of them start again under different names. They don't really have to produce a satisfactory product. They just have to produce a product. Sometimes they don't even do that. The famous story about Zac Home with the half built home is an example of this (and AFAIK Zac Home is still trading. Their reason is that the council and was the problem.)

So while I understand and appreciate the perspective, I can't think of any other industry where customers can fork out hundred of thousands of dollars and not entitled to have their questions answered, and sometimes not even getting the product they paid for. Maybe the gambling industry?

Put it this way, do builders have to tear down and rebuild the house for a hairline scratch? Of course they don't, thats stupid. Has any builder every done anything like that? No.

However, builders on occasions do have to tear down and rebuild part of the house when they are not built to code. And many a times, they STILL don't. Sometimes they can get away with it even if DBDRV and VBA steps in.

So I don't think it's comparable at all. Builders can ignore difficult clients with a slap on their risk. Clients can't ignore difficult builders without losing money.