I've read a few posts lately that I have found disturbing as they imply that PD are just out to rip off their customers and give a bad building experience.
Now, I'm not here to say that everyone who builds with them finds it a breeze, by any means. But I would like to say that of our journey so far the salesman we dealt with was really helpful, honest and helped us as much as possible to create our dream home. Some of his advice we took and some we didn't. But he was there to guide us through the inital steps. We were not mislead at Hopetoun about colours and costs of extras and made our own decisions about how much to spend on upgrades. We knew there would be extra site costs (and there were) so we were prepared for that and found it to be resonable.
The tender/contract appts were fine and very thorough, in fact they bent over backwards to fit us in before I had my baby at the end of last year.
We were given a start date of Feb 2009 and they went over by a couple of weeks but we were not charged any extra as the delay was at their end. They were upfront about the fixed price contract and at no stage did we feel that they were deliberately trying to delay things so they could get more money from us.
It's still early in the piece for us, but so far we have felt like valued customers and have been treated as such. If anyone wants to be treated like royalty when they build a house then go and spend $20 million+ bucks on a mansion in Beverly Hills, California with a long red carpet out the front.
I just needed to get that out
~ Hels ~