Premier Builders Group

danielk,

I just had a meeting with our site supervisor this morning and he didn't seem to worried about it. Once the bricks are done further they can easily pile soil around the permiter to stop water pooling near the footings. It is probably best that the heave / subsidence of the excess water happens during the construction than later as this will help to move things around a little. I am not too concerned, I will still add it to my email that I will send this morning about all of the aspects that I have found.

Hi Macquarie,

Thank you for the feedback on my blog. Welcome to the wonderful world of building with Premier. If you look at the early posts in my blog you will see that I had similar issues with Premier in trying to get things rolling.

We loved Premiers design and had really got ourselves sort of stuck with Premier, this however did not stop me from phoning the sales person and stating that I am seriously considering going with another builder and would like something in writing explaining why they have gone over their own timeframe. The good thing about playing hard ball with Premier is that they are really only a shop front for the real builders behind them so you aren't really going to upset the builder.

A colleague of mine is currently in the preliminary stages with Premier to build a unit in that back of her current property. She managed to write into the preliminary agreement that if they do not provide final drawings and contract documents within 8 weeks she would receive a full refund of the deposit. I did have a word in her ear about adding this....

Their is no harm in harrasing the sales person that you are dealing with and asking if there is anyone else you can talk to to try to move things along.

Good luck and enjoy the process, there are always hurdles and every step takes longer than you expect, but good things happen and you get to see your dream home being built.

nodtc,

That is bazaar, it appears that you are having the opposite experience from us. We struggled at the early stage to get things started and sorted, however once things have started the project is moving along well. I had a meeting with our site supervisor the week before last and he was very chatty, apparently he is looking after 25 jobs all of which are to the west of Springvale Road, starting in Burwood, Blackburn etc. North to Greensborough and as far west as Kyneton. Then there is one more Romeo Homes Site Supervisor who looks after the rest which is to the East of Springvale Road.

After a very slow start with our site things progressed extremely quickly, just recently. Apparently at the moment though there is a very big shortage of brickies. My site supervisor said that they will try to get to lockup without the brickies though.

When things were slow, we just phoned the office a lot and asked how things were going and asked if there was anything we could do to help things along, always very nicely and always politely. One question I would ask is whether they will make your deadline in your contract. If you are not getting any good answers or are being ignored I would write a letter and used clauses out of the contract such as:

I note that clause 34.1 states that you are to give notice if you are expecting an extension of time, however we are yet to receive such notice. Therefore is it your opinion that the building will be finished by the date given in your letter of commencement dated XXXX and subject to clause 40.0 and 40.1 of the contract.

This would let Romeo know that you completely understand your contract and that you are already to count the delay payments.

One of the funny things to note is that we received our base stage invoice about 4 weeks after the base stage was complete. Also our frame has now been complete for a while (all beit with some defects) and again no invoice. Obviously cash flow isn't an issue for them.

Hi all

i am too glad to find out about this site. we are building with Premeir, the Hawthorn Attic. glad to know that this is a popular house. we had just put in our deposit last week and hope it will go well will keep you all posted.
slopy

Hi bambooey,

As far as I know you have to stick with the sales consultant up until the final contract is signed. This will be after you get the site costs sorted as well.

We had to do everything through the sales consultant, price negotiation, contract amendments, everything. When I first got a detailed quote that included the builders contact details I immediately called them, however they did continue to tell me to go through the sales consultant. So the bad news is the only way to get rid of Premier overhead is to pay 5%.

I've also since found that depending where you build your build time can change drastically. Unfortunately, because we are building in an established suburb well away from Pakenham and the growth corridors out west everything takes that little bit longer. My wife had a good chat with one of our plasterers the other day and he explained that it is much easier to get tradies to move from one job to another job quickly and get them back quickly when you are building in an area where your builder is building lots of homes, or even where there are lots of readily available tradies.

PM me if you want to hear some tales of Premier Builders which I have just been the witness to.

We are getting firestreak and I can remember trying to find more details. We hit brick walls too. Next time I talk to the site supervisor I'll see if I can get any details for you.

Hi there,

Buiding can start when all building permits have been supplied.

Your council will grant these.

this is my first post to homeone. We are about to start building with Premier builders/Romeo Homes on our block in Greensborough. Have a bit of a set back with needing a council permit due to height issues but am hoping this will be settled soon.
We are building the Jamieson Attic but have modified it for our sloping block. Have added a basement, extended the meals and garage and the upstairs rumpus to create two large rooms upstairs.
We are blogging about it (of course) which is going to be a great record for us afterwards.
Somedays I wish we could be like the american show Extreme Makeover:home edition, get the house built in a week. Not sure what the long term quality of those places is but wouldn't it be great if builds didn't take so long!

Hi nodtc,

You must have been one of the poor Romeo victims of the site supervisor whose name started with M. Unfortunately he was not terribly good, but Romeo have now removed him. I am extremely impressed with the way that they are fixing the problems that seem to have occurred due to the poor site supervision, however it is sad that it has taken this long. Our build will probably blow out to 13 months by the time we are in. We are having floors sanded at the moment and bricks are being redone. What stage are you up to?

We ended up just escalating and stating our disappointment and things started moving very well after that.

Good luck.