First let me declare my interest... I'm the Customer Service Director at 101 Residential, so this is going to be a partial response
We find that 101 right now are extremely busy which could be a good thing but also a bad thing as we dont want to be forgotten.
You're right, business is good. We think this comes from having a good product, high level of recommendations, of course being one of Scott Park's companies, and I'd like to think our customer service contributes. However, while we're busy, we're growing our team appropriately, so being busy doesn't crush us like it does some companies... in fact we're still averaging lower than our target build times (and happy to compare our build times with any 2 storey builder)... so we're comfortably busy
. With high caliber staff consistently knocking on the door wanting to join the team, we are not just growing the team, we're growing it well. However, getting forgotten is something that can happen in any company, and I'm happy to meet with you to discuss how we'll make sure that doesn't happen.
Like I said before we are very interested that Ben Trager do a concrete upper slab rather than timber because I could imagine nothing worse than hearing walking upstairs (my dads house is a timber upper floor built in 2002 i think and you can hear every time someone walks).
I could talk about accoustic ratings etc, but I think your best bet is to compare the 2 yourself... walk them. You have displays from both companies in Butler. Try them out. Even if I quoted numbers etc, I wouldn't recommend you simply accept them. You can walk around in both, and that should give you a true understanding of the noise factor. If you're interested in more information, I recommend looking into the "slab" construction used by both.
They also seem to have a higher "standard" spec, let me know if you want to know how the quotes differ. At first talks with Ben Trager when we were making slight adjustments to our plan we were told to work off approximatly $900psm and that should give us a rough idea and when I worked out the psm charge for 101 from a rough estimation of the cost it was around $950psm.
The $psm is not always an apples with apples comparison (some companies include areas that others don't etc), and it's very difficult to get a true comparison between products because they vary so much. I think you really need to look closely at the inclusions (solar hot water, 6 star certified etc), as well as many other factors, and determine which offers the right mix of what
you want, and what represents the most value to
you. It would be unwise to choose the builder that offers the best value, but not what you want, and equally (unless you have unlimited funds) it could be unwise to only consider what you want without any thought for the value (or lack of it).
If you are still looking at 101 displays call them first to confirm lol, we drove an hour south to look at 3 displays that were advertised as open and 2 of them were closed (even though one of the closed ones even had 3 home opens signs at the front).
Yes, we'll have to wear that one. I spoke to our Sales Manager, because this simply shouldn't happen, but he tells me we had both illness and car breakdowns that weekend. So our apologies for the inconvenience, it was a rare situation.
Good luck! The thing I want to see most is elated home owners... I hope that's your experience.
CT