Rawson Homes & The Life Style Store - Any feeback?

Hi all,

In the process of trying to finalise our build with Rawson Homes and our Home Theatre & Home Automation needs to be arranged in advance with The Life Style Store (https://www.lifestylestore.com.au/) before our electrical appointment.

We went in to The Life Style Store a while ago and got a quote for a bunch of things from Home Theatre, Multi-Room Audio, Alarm & Access Control system, Intercom & Touch Screen System, Lighting & Device Automation System, but since then my wife has been made redundant and we've just found out we're also going to be expecting a child in 8 months time so I have decided that at this stage perhaps we can only commit to getting all the wiring installed in advance and then adding all devices, etc later once things are more secure financially.

I originally dealt with Brendan C at The Life Style Store, and had left messages for him to try get the quote amended without much luck. Got hold of him on Thursday last week and told him of the situation and asked him to amend the quote so we have it all finalised before our electrical appointment with Rawson and he said he would get something back to me before Friday COB. Even emailed him over a copy of the original quote he provided us so he had this available.

Hadn't received anything yesterday so I sent him another email, no response. Tried calling him today, just goes to his VM.

Just wondering has anyone had any experiences with The Life Style Store because if this is how they do business I really think Rawson should reconsider who they partner with. It's putting me off wanting to use this company for anything but the bare minimum I have to now and starting to stress us out even more because our electrical appointment is already booked in as we certainly didn't think that getting things amended with The Life Style Store would be such an arduous experience.

Would be interested to hear of others experiences as I think I might just end up telling Rawson to run conduits galore in the electrical appointment so I can get someone else to do all the wiring & installation after handover.

We have some surround sound stuff being installed by them. Our SS has had massive trouble getting in touch with them to get it installed now that we've moved in, and even us calling them and emailing has had no response. They're stunningly expensive and their customer service hasn't been amazing.
They didn't have/couldn't install the speakers we originally upgraded to, but they didn't tell us this and instead decided to make them ceiling instead of wall speakers without asking us what we wanted to do. We had to go along with it once they'd cut 5 big holes in the ceiling all in all I'm not impressed so far.

Wow.. thats not good and disappointing to hear.

I wouldn't worry too much, we turned up to our Electrical appointment expecting all our lifestyle store things to have been sent to Rawson and they hadn't received anything. They made a quick call and Brendan had the requirements to us in an hour or so.

We have Brendan as our rep and his communication is pretty much on par with Rawson, which is pretty 💩. You have to cc in the manager and then maybe you get a result. I blew up about getting no reply to emails and he got shirty saying he had replied. I sent an email 2 weeks ago about an issue and I’ve got nothing back. He has been good in other areas but our whole Rawson experience has been ordinary at best. The trade off is they are allowed on site during the build. I know of two others that used them and both recommended them. I’ve seen one in person and it looked the goods. We are hoping they deliver, but like I say it’s the same with Rawson for us.

Thanks for the replies guys, "glad" to see I'm not alone and that it's just the "Rawson Experience" … safety in numbers right? I will have to put some more updates on our build thread as we've had some really fun times since my last updates dealing with our Pre-Construction Administrator at Rawson, Simone B. Anyone else get her? Never get calls returned, she always seems to leave the office around 4pm, have to call to speak with her manager to get a response, emails with very clear requests and detailed diagrams get ignored or misunderstood, fun times. Our Plan Presenter Ashleigh K was pretty good, but things went down hill from there.

It's amazing how many things / measurements can change on updated versions of your plans without any logical reason, and then when you bring this to their attention they try to make out it didn't happen or "oh mistakes happen" or that it's not a big deal. Hang on, you're asking me to sign off on something you then want to hold me to, but it's ok if it's wrong? I'm sure if we didn't pick up the errors until down the track they would want to charge the fee's for making changes after signing off, etc.

But I digress, back to the Life Style Store, got in touch with Brendan this afternoon but not before he had called my work line back and didn't leave a message. So I called him back and left another message and then he called back again. I'll never understand people's inability to leave a voicemail, if you don't leave a message how do I know who you are or why you're calling?!

He has sent through a stripped back pre-wiring only quote but there are still things on there I'm really wondering about, I mean $700-800 for a single HDMI cable!? There's a sucker born every day but I think for that I might just get Rawson to install a conduit as I'll use pre-made cables so no worries about having to be licenced, etc.

Definitely think it's worth it to get them to put things like the speaker wiring in for the in-ceiling speakers we want in various rooms, pre-wiring for electric door latch, intercom, etc, but some of the hardware "brains" costs for the Control 4 stuff and speakers seems over the top so at this stage it will really just be committing to the pre wiring until we find out what is happening with the Mrs job options.

This reads like I wrote it. 🤔😁. Same experience with Rawson. Don’t remember if I said it before but they are in breach of contract for our job. They also came back with a heap of changes put down to “building constraints”. I’m filthy now because they reduced our alfresco size by something ridiculous and we questioned it but never got an answer. Then we got side tracked and forgot about it.

Anyway, glad old mate got back to you.

I'm not suprised your alfresco query could get lost in the process, as when you know the plans are wrong but they want you to sign off for now, as it will get addressed at a later stage.
So then you've got to make sure it really can be changed without cost later (be paranoid, confirm it in writing), and that you remember to bring it up again at the appropriate time. They really make sure you know about the "$450 + $600 change fee", but it's not clear when it applies. Fingers crossed we haven't run afoul of this yet.

I'd really prefer that each time something is signed off, it's correct as it can be, not "its ok for now, and that will get updated at another appointment" and trusting that what you've been told is true after you've met your sixth Rawson person in the pipeline.