Browse Forums Building A New House Re: Building with Kurmond Homes 1695Apr 24, 2018 11:09 am Good Morning all, Long time reader, fist time poster. I bought an unregistered block of land and decided I liked the Bronte 32 floor plan offered by Kurmond at the time... April 2017- Signed Tender May 2017 - External appointments, Internal appts 2 weeks later June 2017- Subcontrator appointments - Tiles, sentinel alarms etc. (Yes I did these AFTER internal appointments... don't even get me started) August - Kurmond completed the site survey October 2017- Land registered November - I got my plans with my house sited on the block.. they pushed the house to the back of the block and we lost about 2m of backyard space. No one told us of the change, they just send the plans and asked us to sign. There was a 2 month saga over the location of the house, so now we have a split level home. December 17 - Lodged with council on the last day of work for December. 8th Feb 2018- Council approval received. (oh, and they told me they wouldn't look at the digital copy of the approval, they had to wait an extra week to get the hard copy from council....) Feb 2018 - Told we would start construction in APRIL .... 6th of April - Construction Certificate (why it took 2 months for a construction certificate I don't know). Today ---- I still don't have a contract... so.... apparently my drawings are now out of drafting (why they are STILL with drafting beats me..). I still can't even get a start date out of these people... Pretty fed up at this point. I signed with them while we were unregistered so we would be ready. Well, there's people in my newly released estate with bricks up and internal fit outs done.... nada17 - I also had the same problem with the HCBF price increase. I entered all my details into the Icare website and screen shotted it back to them, they were trying to charge me $880 over and above the cost (mind you they apparently have a 30% premium on all of their insurances...) I managed to get the extra charge waived. I signed my tender 2 days AFTER this legislation came into effect that increased the prices... 12 months ago. And they only JUST told me about it. Re: Building with Kurmond Homes 1696Apr 24, 2018 12:56 pm I think they are just trying to get more money from you this way or another. I will anyway request an invoice from the broker and see how much they overcharged me. I think they cannot have any "premiums" as they are not a licensed broker. I sent them an e-mail about the insurance and they replied last Friday "The application has been submitted and the review completed and it is now with the broker to issue the invoice and certificate. Hoping to receive early next week". It is Tuesday afternoon and no insurance at all. If anyone knows who is their HCBF broker, please let me know. I want to dig further. I am sure that they are deliberately delaying everything. An again, for people who are considering building with Kurmond: do not fall for their promises. sales people have no idea what they are talking about. the head office will charge for things which you already signed variations. they will also delay everything trying to fit you to their busy and understaffed schedule. They don't care that you are just losing money every week. They will offer you $5 for each working day of delays in construction which is something like $100 each months they delay. Of course they are not going to pay for months and months of delays during the pre-construction stage. So basically they are not responsible for meeting any deadlines. They just don't care. Re: Building with Kurmond Homes 1697Apr 24, 2018 1:33 pm nada17 same here, we currently have 20 revisions of our drawings because they just cannot do anything without errors. we had to comment again and again. they also keep changing things you didn't ask them to change. so when you ask them to move a partition wall you still have to check all the drawings just to make sure everything the way you want and nothing has been changed without your knowledge. before signing tender we made sure most of the critical for us things would be on plans. for example, we moved mixers in showers the way they are easier to access (we don't like it when they are directly under shower heads ). how surprised we were when couple months ago they put the mixers back to their original places and asked for extra money if we want the mixers to be moved. I had the EXACT same thing happen! My colour consultant recommended to move the mixers, which I thought was a great idea... then she got fired and my NEW colour consultant was like 'oh but you have to pay $110 for that'. We paid it grudgingly. And every time I get a new copy of my drawings my laundry sink changes position... EVERY TIME. I have a galley laundry with room for benches on both sides (that i will be getting put in after handover, because 10k for a laundry fitout was excessive). They don't make any notes about what they change on drawings at all. I found a really good tool, it's a PDF program called Bluebeam. If you can make use of the free trial then you can actually overlay 2 pages on top of each other, so you can see exactly what doesn't line up with the previous revision. I caught them out on shrinking my hallway by 100mm, moving my laundry sink, moving the location of the house, changing wall thickness. Re: Building with Kurmond Homes 1698Apr 24, 2018 1:43 pm Yes, Everything is a delay with them, I haven't been able to pin them down on dates for ANYTHING. So my longest/stupidest delay.. I had my internal appointment in MAY 2017. My colour file was finalised in MARCH 2018 ... 10 months... I cannot even express the amount of stupidity I have dealt with. I was one of the 30 clients that got screwed over by a colour consultant who didn't know what she was doing, or was doing things wrong or who knows. I thought that would have put me in a better position now because I thought they may have tried to make up for it. But no.. 10 and a half weeks after council approval I don't have a contract.. Worst thing is, i have some competitive friends who bought in the same estate... Their 2 story house now has bricks... and I still have weeds.. What designs has everyone gone with?? Re: Building with Kurmond Homes 1699Apr 24, 2018 2:05 pm our colour was in October 2017 and the file was closed in March 2018.
and we also dealt with lovely Kristie (name changed) ............... which promised us to come back with our colours within 2 weeks after the appointment and when we called after 2 weeks we found out that she doesn't work there anymore. and there 4+ months of silence... we also have neighbours who got registered at the same time - and 2 weeks ago they had their bricks finished. if anyone is interested, they build with "new living homes". I cannot say much about them, I just see that they are probably 4-5 months ahead Kurmond. we are building Claremont 23 - it is a small double storey as our lot is very tiny. By the way, we always send them Bluebeam sketches as comments. my partner and I are both in design/construction industry so we usually know what we are talking about when commenting. We always try to make their like easier giving them all the needed info because coordination of projects with other consultants is part of our daily tasks. I have never dealt with such unprofessional people in my life. Re: Building with Kurmond Homes 1700Apr 24, 2018 2:26 pm Wow, Me too, I'm a project coordinator in the construction industry. Unfortunately sending them sketches in bluebeam doesn't help... I tried...I drew them a sketch of what my alfresco cabinets should have looked like... 4 revisions later and it's still not right. For the first 3 revisions I had a full height refrigerator (instead of an underbench bar fridge hole). Now i have a hole for it, with no bench.. so.. progress? I had my appointment in May with KB, and she didn't leave until Oct/Nov... and my file still hadn't been sorted by the time she left. As far as I know she didn't even send my amendments to the drafting department at all, because when I got assigned a new person it hadn't been done yet. I even had argued with KB for about 2 months over whether I had fly screens on my alfresco doors. Oh, and I had to call all the external suppliers myself and book my appointments AFTER my internal appointment, because she booked in my internal appointment, and till hadn't even emailed my file to the suppliers. So, probably no great loss there that she didn't work on your file. Although the replacement wasn't any faster... I didn't get any documents from her until FEB. Ask for references and speak to them. If they are defensive or try to avoid the request, walk. 1 74688 I would never build with Fowler homes. I built with them in 2021 and till date maintenance issues are pending. All their existing trades and businesses don't work with… 14 105490 Hi there! Putting the feelers out there for those who have (or almost) built with Arli homes! Interested in your experiences who've built from their stock home designs… 0 23465 |