We have decided to put some information on this site about our experience building with 101 Residential as there was not a lot of information when we signed up with them 1yr ago. We will precursor this by stating our experience with 101 has been far from good to date.
The sales staff were excellent when we began looking and we did as many checks as we could before signing and asked alot of questions over many months. One of the main reasons for signing with 101 was we were informed it was a quick build time. The salesperson continued to contact us even after we had signed and we still feel he was a standout from other builders.
Our troubles began as soon as we signed. We found office staff never contacted us or got back to queries. Our prestart was very unorganised and we waited sometimes 2 weeks to get any answer. Since then, 101 has come back to us to confirm things in the prestart as it wasn't properly coordinated at the time. Also prices were not clear and the prestart lady could not answer any questions about the products they suggested we should consider.
We have had massive blow outs in costs with poor surveying and poor communication. We have had to sink in a massive amount of retaining even though we asked questions on this from the start. The best we got was that 101 would do this at cost. Although this is a gesture, it still cost us 20k more than we knew of and didn't cost 101 anything as it was done at 'our cost'.
We met with customer service people and the gm about our complaints and felt they were at least trying to attempt to repair issues we had been experiencing however unfortunately this really does appear to have been 'lip service' as many issues have since arisen on an ongoing basis and there seems little real intent to get this back on track.
The major selling point for us was their ongoing rhetoric around a faster build. The actual experience is, it has taken 10 months since signing to actually even start on site. After taking double the time we were instructed worst case scenarios take to get started, they are not moving the building process any faster to make up for the poor organisation that caused this (we are told 24 to 30 week build on top of the 10 months). This has resulted in us renting far longer than projected and an expected handover that will take possibly 1yr and a half.
We have five cases of friends that started building at the same time or after us with other builders, including double storeys through in vogue (they have had a great exp) and all are completed or about to handover. We haven't got the roof on yet.
Our final sadness is that recently upon putting the second storey on, we have had to engage a building inspector as it did not look to engineer specifications. He confirmed this and we have had to ask 101 to finish the job correctly welding the second storey properly. We have also had cracking mortar in the garage with the bricks falling off the wall.
We have thought long and hard about this before placing this blog. We have heavily engaged 101in the hope that they would rise to the issues but this has not really been the case. We also wrote Scott park in an effort to see if even higher up the chain would help, but no response. As we hit 1 yr since building and still a long way from finished, we now feel we have been patient enough.
We would sum up the experience as one of over promise and under deliver. Be aware that the build times we are still seeing written about by 101, has been far from what we have experience. We are also seeing others beginning to write the feeling that 101 has sold a lot of places and now can't keep up with the demand.
Because of this we felt that although we will unfortunately experience undue renting costs and a poor building experience, we would try to put some actual information that may be seen by others so they fully check. We have heard great things about Ben Trager homes, in vogue homes and summit.
We also understand our case may be extreme and it is unlikely everyone will be this unfortunate with101 (murphys law says when it rains it pours). However as the gm stated to us, "it's not if things go wrong, it's how the builder reacts when they do".
Please feel free to contact us with any questions as we can go into details about many many issues that have arisen that may help you in considering a builder or at least questions to ask. We were 1st time builders so it has taken us some time and many conversations to realise how bad our exp has been. Certainly we have had a dozen friends we have steered away from 101 due to our experience to date which is unfortunate.
We hope out build hurries up.