Browse Forums General Discussion 1 Jan 15, 2020 11:44 am Will be downsizing when hubby retires in just over a year . Currently have lived in southern hills area (Happy Valley) for 35 years & want to move nearer the sea...Looking from Sellicks to Victor Harbor. Will be bulding new home. Have built current home with Hickenbotham 15 years ago . Happy with the house. BUT looking at Rivergum ‘clad’ house on wooden piers V Hickenbotham home on cement footings . Been told by Rivergum that clad home on wooden piers is cheaper than building concrete foottings. BUT Hickenbotham homes are the cheapest per SQ Meter...as they build so many. Anyone have any comments? Re: RIVER GUM OR HICKENBOTHAM. 2May 14, 2021 2:01 pm Hello, To those thinking about building their first home, their forever home, or investment property…. Think twice before picking Rivergum as your builder. Rivergum will seem like the ideal choice at the beginning, but things start to get out of hand once you sign the documents and put a deposit down. I warn you as I thought things could be avoided if you are diligent and do your research. Currently Rivergum does not care about the way they treat their customers, and it shows. I have reached out to a whole community of new homeowners and in the matter of minutes I got so many messages about peoples horror stories involving Rivergum. Please do yourself a favor and pick a different builder… Reasons to NOT build with Rivergum: 1. What you get told by the sales associate is different than what gets told to you after signing documents. a. We were told that we should have always had a lawyer present with us recording all of our conversations. Because clearly trusting the information a representative of theirs tells you is not enough. You are required to have every bit of information written out by them for Rivergum to go through with what they promised. Unfortunately, the sales associate left Rivergum in the middle of our process and we were left to fend for ourselves. So if you want to build with them make sure you hire a lawyer for all your appointments with Rivergum pre-signing documents. b. You may also want to hire an inspector to go through your house as many of the other homeowners I spoke with had STRUCTURAL errors in their build. And that did not surprise me because Rivergum is WAY understaffed and they are building too many houses at once to put any care into your home. 2. The locations as to where you put your lights or you power points or anything really in your house is… pointless. Why? Because when it comes time to build your house they will decide where all of these things go. They will move them wherever they want without that telling you, but god forbid you decide the day after selections you want to add in a power point or downlight. You will incur a $1,000 fee and the fee for the added things. But hold on it gets better. They make you feel like you are indebted to them because they will so graciously tell you “as a gesture of good will” we will remove the fee. It’s sickening how they make you feel like they are so gracious in not charging $1,000 that would literally require no extra work to them…. 3. They also never answer their emails. So, if you have a question or if you need a response as you are trying to coordinate tradies after handover. I hope you have a month and 30 emails ready to send so that you can get a response. This will become your second job. Making sure that they are aware of your emails and that you are in the loop of what is going on with your home. 4. If you thought oh maybe you can be more diligent in your walk throughs… well, you thought wrong. We had to pay $800 for a conduit system for our solar since Rivergum would not allow other tradies on site while the frame was bare so that our solar providers could run their cables through. So instead, we paid $800 for pipes to go through the house for our solar people to run wires through after house is built. Through all our walk throughs we asked about the conduits and we were told if it is in the plans, it will get done. We emailed the main office confirming that it was done as our site supervisor didn’t give us much confidence and they too said it would get done. We asked every walk through and sent emails to confirm. They never did it. Instead, we had the hassle of having tradies come to the house during work hours 2 days to do what we paid to get done in first place. So, they are allowed to break their contract with you but when you want to make a minor change you’ll incur a $1,000 fine, or not but you sure as hell will hear about how giving they were to you. 5. Are you thinking maybe you were not speaking to the right people? Welllll…. When you email the founder, managing director, national general manager and things still get messed up then you know they really do not care how they treat their customers. 6. What if you hold your last payment and make sure they do everything right before they get their money? I thought so too… They will actually start charging you interest every day past the due date because they just can. 7. Do you have a maintenance sheet of things you found wrong in your house? Well expect to wait 3 years for that to get done. Or make it your second job to send their maintenance team an email every day to get it done. Why? Because Rivergum did sooo many botched jobs that their maintenance team is probably overloaded with work and your house is at the bottom of a VERY long list of wrongly built homes. Maybe you know exactly what you want from the beginning, down to EVERY single detail or you don’t mind that things get changed or you don’t care if your house doesn’t come out the way you envisioned. Then yeah Rivergum is the builder for you. If you at all care about customer service or your home then save your money and go somewhere else. The headache you get from Rivergum’s incompetence is not worth it. Rivergum could avoid 90% of their issues if they had more employees to even out the workload. Their employee turnover rate is shocking and their communication with their tradies is non-existent. Whatever you think you could do to avoid these issues is never going to work because Rivergum has a systematic issue within the company that not you or me will be able to solve. So, you are doomed from the very beginning. I mean begin by asking how many homes 1 site supervisor, 1 customer service advisor has at once for you to see why they are so many issues and add in bad communication and there is your recipe for disaster. GO ELSEWHERE!!!!! |