M3tricon in Victoria - General consensus

Hi Guys,

I'm about to build with M3tricon, up to contract stage, and I'm a little worried to all the bad review that they have been given in productreview.com.au and bestbuilder.com.au. They are really bad. Now I know that some of these review come from QLD, which I hear is not very good, so I'd like to get a general consensus from the people who have built in Melbourne, specifically in the western suburbs. My friend has just finished with them as well and they had a lot of headackes, more with the completion date. Went way over their date of about 5 months. Which I hear Met is famous for. Also if there is anything that I can do to basically get me built a nice little house in a reasonally amount of time.

So far the (Met) have been ok, no real drama's, but from what I read, is that after I sign the contract their level of service just goes down the drain (well I hope not). I really do like the houses that Met are building, the designs and finishes are great in the display homes and the sales manager was very good, pitty I couldn't have her as my customer service consultant. But no real complaints with my CSC, I do believe is that she is very busy though, which may affect the service she provides to me. Guess its building consultant who are working on my house has a huge affect.

So if I get some feedback on Met owners from Melbourne that would be great.

Thanks

I think that if you use the search option, you can see a number of posts, including mine on this suject. Apart from some contract spelling issues, we had no problems, and had a great build.

Hi

I had a bad experience with them even before signing the contract and ultimately decided to pull of and went to PD.

they only started to care about us as customers when i sent an email to them mentioning that i dont want to do business with them. This is when i started to get phone calls from their top bosses, however earlier i made every effort for someone to resolve my problem but to no avail.

Our SC at Met was the best i have ever met.

It was later that stage that everything and i litterally mean everything screwed up, i decided to lose $1000 instead of losing my night sleeps.

On the other hand, i have seen people on this forum leaving PD and other builders for Met and found them much better in place of others.

I think it really depends what are you looking for, if you are after great customer service post sales process, NAH dont expect it from any builder.

Just think that do you really like the house that you have chosen with Met, if yes, then it will be an effort to try and get resolved every issue that you have, but then think about the end product that you will love.

I hope i have not confused you more.

Thanks for that, yeah I think its the people who is working on your house that makes the big difference, whether being its PD, Hen or Met, it all boils down to getting the good ones from the bad.

I do really like the house (Mercer), as we have made a few changes to the standard. All I want is a good quality home in the end that does not take longer than 9 month to build. WELL I HOPE

If anyone else out there has good or bad experiences please chuck in your two cents.

Thanks

sorry, i forgot to mention
one of my colleagues is also building with Met, she is building Grandview 30.
Few days back she told me that they were now at lock up stage
and she is very happy with them so far.
whenever i speak to her, she crosses her fingers and says " so far so good"
So, i think really it depends on people you get to deal with and depends how patient and calm and composed you are to deal with their mistakes because we know all of them are going to make mistakes, some might make more and some might make less.
So SonnyG just go with what your gut says.
all the best

Hi, we're in the eastern suburbs and will be moving into our new house in 2 weeks time. It's taken exactly 6 months to build (Santorini 29). Our headache was mainly with the pre-build and we were misled over siting costs and delayed for ages, mainly due to lack of communication..

I think they build good houses but our experience of their customer service has been shocking. I think we've had one phone call from our CSC during the entire build. It's always left to us to do the chasing. They've caused me quite a lot of stress and anxiety by just never letting us know what's going on and being very cagey about dates - it's like a huge secret when they've booked tradies in.

I have to say though, I've not met anyone who has built with them in Vic that have gone over contract, I think our build contract ends in November so they've finished well ahead of time.

Hi Pod
How did they mislead you over site costs?
Did they charge you more than what was in the contract?

Sonnyg,

We are building with M and our house is at fixing stage.

Hmmm...
what can i say?

Our 1st SC was great, but when we started changing the house, we realised that there was a better SC than her (he was very good with Signature houses) so we requested for an SC replacement.
It took a long time to change SC because the 1st SC was claiming she did a lot of work for us already.
But we were able to get a better deal with the SC and he was more knowledgeable with all the upgrades. We even spoke with the SM just to insist that we want the new SC.

Then goes the contract stage.. we went straight to contract as we were already late in building (needed to build within a year from land settlement and it was 1.5 yrs already and we haven't started building!).
There were some errors with the plans during contract signing, but we only signed on the agreement that all the errors would be fixed post contract, and they did!

We had lots of variations with the colours, tiles, etc (after contract signing) and our colour consultant was more than willing to change them.

Our only complaints are as follows:
- our CSC during building only responds to emails after weeks of follow up. once we follow up and cc her manager, that's the time that she calls us
- issue with the slab overhang, which was fixed afterwards
- some drawing issues that were only realised during the build (e.g. needed to make the bulkhead to HT smaller due to the high doors that we wanted, location of the fridge power point, etc.)

What worked for us was that we always inform our CSC (although response has always been late) as soon as we find any issues with the house. If we don't receive feedback and we feel that it's major/urgent, we copy furnish the CM and CSM to ensure that higher management is aware of our issues.

The most important thing is, we LOVE the house and it's the perfect house for our block (due to orientation and addresses most of the design guidelines.

When we joined this forum, we learned that
- no builder is perfect
- building a house involves frustration, stress and a lot of emotion
- you could get your builder's attention once you elevate the issues to the higher management
- it's worth to get an independent inspection

There was a time that we were so stressed and almost felt giving up.
The forum members here helped us a lot to handle the situation.

Over all, we never regreted our decision to build with M.
I believe all people who builds a house experience some kind of stress/frustration along the way.

Fingers crossed though.. as we still have 4 weeks to go before handover..

Let's see what happens within that 4 weeks.

Good luck on your decision on which house to build.
the most important thing is, you like the house that you are going to build.
after all, you're going to live in it for so many years!

Hi, our initial SC was good in that she helped us choose the right home for our block, but I distinctly remember having to really drag a site cost estimate out of her, she said she couldn't say, I asked for a rough idea and she said 'about $5000'. They did all the soil tests etc, and we did Studio 501, went for our PC signing to find that site costs had come in at $22000. They basically missed out an entire step of their flow chart in that we didn't have any feedback about site costs, I think we should have had a proper quote from them once they got all the tests back.

We refused to pay that amount. So followed about 8 weeks of them going on a wild goose chase and trying to blame everyone else for the expensive site costs, even suggesting we go back to the land developers as they'd put too much top soil on the land or some such nonsense. Denied that the SC had ever told us an estimate and then said the responsibility was with us for never asking for an exact estimate of site costs, apparently we'd only ever asked if they could actually build on our block of land. Complete bollocks, but their word against ours. At this point my OH flipped and sent them an email listing all their promises that they boast of on their website and pointing out how they'd failed at each step. They phoned him about 2 minutes after he'd sent this email and finally did something - spoke to someone higher up who worked out if the house was moved 800mm to the side this would save us about$8K. Then we cut a few other upgrades out (like air con) and got back to within budget (just about ).

So that was the saga - this was all exactly a year ago! I'm kind of resigned to their rubbish customer service now, I don't get as stressed as I used to about it and I've got used to phoning/emailing and stating very simply what I want and expect rather than ranting.

Yeah we had a similar story to the site cost pod, but our was charging too much for a little cut a fill. Our initial Sales Consultant ran a fixed site cost calculation and came to $17,500, which I new was wrong as our land is pretty much flat. The land did rise in the front 5 metres but after that it was level. Then she said that the cost will change after they do our soil test and the exact cost would be shown in our pre-lim contract. Then on our pre-lim contract we noticed that the cost didn't change and our customer service said it was a fixed cost and couldn't be change. Looking at the engineering report all they had to do was shift 100mm from one side to another and they wanted to charge $17,500 for that. Said that we were not going to pay that for such a little job that it'll take them 30 min to do. She saw her manager and brought it down to $12,500, which I still think is expensive. I think that it should of cost on around $8K - $10K, they explained as well about our slab was 'H' class, reasoning why it cost so much, but in the end we just went with it as we wanted to build that house and they were the only ones who were going to do it.

Tell you what, they really know how to make money off us from an easy job. Once the building starts hopefully in October, I'll keep my eye on them like a hawk (GO THE HAWKS!!!) and like everyone says, rough it out, keep on them and don't take any crap.

Thanks guys

Hi Sonny,

We are building with M3tricon in regional Victoria, based out of their Traralgon office. We've had a pretty good run so far (we get handover in a week) but it helps to be a bit assertive along the way.

I'll even give them a conditional plug: IF we were to build again, AND we could use the same sales reps, supervisors, customer service and front office people, AND certain tradespeople were not used again, THEN we wouldn't even bother looking for a different builder.

Hi,
We built the mercer and we're very happy with it! Started in June last year and house was finished in Dec. We didn't move until Feb because we we're waiting on flooring being finished. Overall very happy with the build. We got Kevin to do pre-plaster and final inspection - I think this was important. The builders agreed to fix any problems that were identified.

A lot depends which area you're in, which contractors you get etc. Keep on top of things, keep an eye on the build and raise any issues immediately with your csc and I'm sure you'll be fine.

Good luck with your build!

Hi
I was looking atbuilding with another builder and did some searching. Apparently (found all information on-line through the Age) PD are sueing them and a number of other builders for copyright. Check it out by searching through Google. Friends of ours built with them and were not too happy. I think no matter who you build with there will be headaches!
LL