Browse Forums Building A New House Re: Are you building with Alkira? 22Jun 02, 2013 9:09 pm We've had a few confidence-affecting things with them; but I also suspect the same issues would occur with any project builder, and relate to their communication with us. However, we went to the Home Show recently (thanks HomeOne! ), and when we mentioned we were considering getting serious with Alkira a few people there said positive things. Additionally, a mate who finished his build maybe 18 months ago with a completely different builder was told by a few project-builders that having bricks upstairs wasn't an option due to the structure of the house not being able to cope with the weight; whereas our house's design has upstairs walls not over downstairs ones (ie. it has support beams) and the standard construction is brick ... it all does make me feel more comfy with them. The thing I particularly have in mind is getting an unclear impression of whether we can have level flooring upstairs (tiles right through the house & not wanting the usual obvious step-up into wet areas upstairs - which are normal with carpet or wood flooring). However it turns out the tiler is the person who actually has to worry about that, and the tiler knows exactly what we want, so the misunderstanding is purely someone in the office not really knowing how to describe the solution to us. IMHO it's really important you have confidence, though. If you can't get that, I can see value in looking elsewhere. For us, Alkira do look to be the best project builders we've found. If this all goes to poo for some as-yet un-anticipated reason, we're definitely going owner-builder and employing a custom builder to manage the process; because it's our opinion that if Alkira can't do it no other project builder can. Re: Are you building with Alkira? 24Jul 25, 2013 10:16 pm There's a contract in the mail as I type this ... should arrive tomorrow ... we'll check it over the weekend, should get CDC approval next week, approved plans should then get approval from the bank. While we were still dealing with sales staff, yeah, there were some times we didn't get timely responses. But once we'd accepted the initial quote/tender, and started down the path of getting the build CDC approved & making all decisions etc we had absolutely no communications issues at all. And frankly I suspect we're nightmare customers, absolutely nothing of ours is standard & we've kept them running for 6 months! I hope someone in their building office reads this, because I can't speak highly enough of any of the Alkira admin stuff who've dealt with us. The only times we've waited on Alkira to get us a response, for more than about a day or two, is when they were waiting on someone external. To be honest, that's my biggest complaint about the whole process; the stuff that was chosen/organised through Home Options Gallery involved a helluva lot of back-and-forth & cross-checking & correcting. I almost think that what they save on staff for those selections, they probably spend on staff to check the selections. Re: Are you building with Alkira? 25Jul 26, 2013 2:29 pm Thanks Forg. Like you we started with Rawson but lost confidence for a number of reasons. Went to Alkira because we liked the Olivia floor plan and as you say, are still with the sales staff. We will try and hang in there until the next phase but one would think its not that hard to update a customer or send a quick email. Maybe our expectations are too high. Re: Are you building with Alkira? 26Jul 26, 2013 3:08 pm After it became obvious that Rawson had lost interest in us, and we started looking around at others, I was very seriously considering about a dozen different volume builders. Once you get down to the arrangement of boxes (rooms) in particular ways & facing a particular direction (ie. the rooms we wanted facing north, the garage needing to face the road), you start finding a lot of designs that can be modified to suit what you want (even though we found nothing we didn't need to modify) ... and hence there were quite a few that seemed like possibilities. Anyhoo, we were serious with all of them; we weren't just kicking tyres & slamming doors, our intention was DEFINITELY to be spending well over half a million dollars with one of them. But probably 1/3 of them never got back to me on my questions, and half of the ones that did couldn't actually answer those questions. I suspect there must just be a lot of people who end-up not going ahead with a build, and that builder's salespeople are therefore conditioned to spend absolutely as little time on possible on people who are "only prospects". I can think of only a couple of exceptions to this; kind-of a shame that the Trevelle Homes designs all needed so much modification 'cos their salesguy was really helpful. Re: Are you building with Alkira? 27Aug 15, 2013 12:34 pm Up to finalising the plans. We are now waiting on the revised final final plans. So far things have been ok. A little slow but probably due to us wanting things to be just right before progressing. We are building the 37.5 m Elyse 15. Once these plans are signed off on our stuff will go in for council DA approval. Fingers crossed as we are needing them to approve the plans with a smaller than normal side setback. It's a corner block and Sutherland council usually require 3m side setback but we are counting on hopefully less than 2m so everything fits nicely. Hope you don't mind me joining the forum. You sound like you might be at similar stages. Re: Are you building with Alkira? 28Aug 15, 2013 1:32 pm Good to hear of other folk building with these guys! I think Alkira's admin staff hate me, we queried so much stuff & altered so many things from standard ... I also think I've said that before. We've got a final contract, and we're waiting for the bank to hurry up so we can sign. We've got "conditional" loan approval, and we know we can meet all the conditions except for the loan:value ratio thing, and the assessor called me yesterday to ask for the documents the bank hadn't got through to him yet so that value assessment must be pretty close to done. So I'm crossing my fingers for that assessment to come-through in our favour in the next few working-days, then I'll run over to Alkira & sign the contract as well as scheduling the demolition & the encasement of the sewer-pipe (for which there's an easement) in the back yard. Once all those dominoes are lined-up, they can start. Oh - I guess moving-out should be somewhere in that list of things-to-do, preferably before the demolition ... Having been drug-up in The Shire, I've heard a few times that they're pretty reasonable (as far as councils go); so you should be right. We've avoided a fair whack o' pain building through CDC; Ryde council rules are pretty-much identical to Sutherland ones (in fact our street here even feels like our street in Sylvania), and there's no way we could build what we're building under council rules. Re: Are you building with Alkira? 29Aug 16, 2013 1:40 pm Hi Cronulla Build, are you building at Greenhills by any chance? We are building the Olivia 37 with Alkira. Just waiting on our first set of plans and have our external colour selections in two weeks. We haven't modified the floor plan so shouldn't be to difficult. Sutherland Council are approving the DA's at Greenhills in under 4 weeks for the standard blocks. Not sure how long its taking for the corner blocks. Re: Are you building with Alkira? 30Sep 15, 2013 7:09 pm Any updates on peoples build experiences with alkira....noticed no updates for a month. Re: Are you building with Alkira? 31Sep 15, 2013 8:13 pm Things are not going as smoothly as we had hoped. Still waiting on our first set of plans after 5 weeks and this for a house with no modifications other than estate requirements. Our cso doesn't seem to have her head around our project. During our external colour selections we attempted to confirm the standard paint colours but she could not answer this and would have the 'colour lady' call us. This did not happen and due to externals being completed through the Home Options Gallery, which is an external agency, it made things difficult as they can't give you immediate pricing. In the end one of the colours we selected was $720 extra, which we were not prepared to pay. This meaning we had to complete our externals over the phone and not during our scheduled meeting. As a result we haven't seen our external colours together and tried to get swatches with no luck. We can only hope they are ok but the staff at Home Options Gallery were really helpful, so that is a positive. I know the admin process frustrates everybody but I'm starting to think the building game is not for us. But our sales rep has been good so we will hang in there for a little bit to see what happens. Re: Are you building with Alkira? 32Sep 15, 2013 8:27 pm boppa7 Things are not going as smoothly as we had hoped. Still waiting on our first set of plans after 5 weeks and this for a house with no modifications other than estate requirements. Our cso doesn't seem to have her head around our project. During our external colour selections we attempted to confirm the standard paint colours but she could not answer this and would have the 'colour lady' call us. This did not happen and due to externals being completed through the Home Options Gallery, which is an external agency, it made things difficult as they can't give you immediate pricing. In the end one of the colours we selected was $720 extra, which we were not prepared to pay. This meaning we had to complete our externals over the phone and not during our scheduled meeting. As a result we haven't seen our external colours together and tried to get swatches with no luck. We can only hope they are ok but the staff at Home Options Gallery were really helpful, so that is a positive. I know the admin process frustrates everybody but I'm starting to think the building game is not for us. But our sales rep has been good so we will hang in there for a little bit to see what happens. So, where are you building boppa7? Do you mind if I ask which house are you building? The missus and I went to have a look at the Alkira Home display at the Hermitage and we liked the Liana....well, the better halve liked the kitchen more than anything (especially the walk in pantry). Boppa7, would you recommend these guys. Are they professional and to their word in your assessment, thus far? Did you do a tender with Alkira and do you think they were fair? Re: Are you building with Alkira? 33Sep 16, 2013 8:19 am justwondering1 Any updates on peoples build experiences with alkira....noticed no updates for a month. No updates from me because it's taken the <expletive> bank over a month to get the construction-loan underway. It's a bit of a PITA, from a loan POV, to have to get external bods in to do stuff like demolition, landscaping, driveways, etc. The bank only wants to give money to the builder, so giving money to a bunch of extraneous other building-related people is a problem. So I've got no more experience of Alkira than I had probably 6 weeks ago, it's been more than that since I've contacted them ... we're close to 4 months past our quote/tender expiry date now. Re: Are you building with Alkira? 34Sep 16, 2013 7:26 pm JW1, we are building the Olivia 37. At this stage its a bit early to say if I would recommend them but I can say our sales rep has been good. We have signed off on a tender and a few things came back a bit more expensive than another tender we had with Rawson, but they were more than happy to match the price. Like most builders some things were expensive whilst others were reasonable. Personally I think its best to get a few tenders irrespective of the cost as the price matching we obtained far outweighed the cost of having two tenders completed. Re: Are you building with Alkira? 35Oct 31, 2013 9:04 am Sorry I have't posted in so long... We've just been finalising our plans for approval, which has taken much longer as our rear balcony was outside approval guidelines and needed to be re-drawn, alkira architects have been away etc etc and we have also finished selecting our internals. So today: - our plans have been submitted, awaiting for approval in approximately 10 days (or so they say..) - still finalising small details of our internals selections. I passed on upgrading some items but after thinking about it, I would like some other things upgraded! I must say the process has become much more pleasant. The staff helping with the build are very nice and return my emails! Will try to post a blog on the build at a later date Re: Are you building with Alkira? 36Nov 01, 2013 7:39 am Chumlee Sorry I have't posted in so long... It's good to hear you're getting some progress! Quote: I must say the process has become much more pleasant. The staff helping with the build are very nice and return my emails! We've been through the process up to the stage you're at with two builders now ... Alkira and Rawson (which I'll get to in a minute). OK it's not exactly the same stage; with Rawson we were still working on findng-out what was allowed. However, the experience with the long & painful admin/selections process (which seems to be long & slow with every volume builder) was WAY better with Alkira because the people keeping those 100-or-so balls in the air for you are so much more communicative. Plus we were being asked questions all the time; with Alkira, assumptions (which were incorrect half the time) weren't being made with asking us. It's interesting that I missed this & didn't comment on it ... boppa7 JW1, we are building the Olivia 37. At this stage its a bit early to say if I would recommend them but I can say our sales rep has been good. We have signed off on a tender and a few things came back a bit more expensive than another tender we had with Rawson, but they were more than happy to match the price. Like most builders some things were expensive whilst others were reasonable. I must admit, a lot of what we had priced by Alkira felt overpriced, but when I looked into it, the prices were fair. It's difficult dealing with the fact that you're not paying cost-plus-20%, you're paying RRP-plus-20% ... a lot of things you can Google around for & find on eBay for half of RRP & then it seems like you're paying cost-plus-140% ... However the experience with Alkira was a lot less painful than with Rawson. We were dealing purely with salespeople, with Rawson, and those salespeople had no authority to make any pricing decisions/commitments & had to keep passing "no" back to us after 3-week waits. The Alkira sales team pull out a big book of prices, holding most things most people would ask for, and plonk those prices into the very first version of your tender ... so our tender from Alkira took ~2 weeks vs never actually being delivered complete from Rawson after about 4-5 months. Now the whole process to getting a contract took about 9 months (our tender expired after 6 & Alkira had two price-changes totalling about 7% during that time - which they didn't hit us up for), but it felt like something was happening the whole time; it took Rawson 4-5 extra months to finally get back to us & tell us that the reason they'd not been responding to our calls & emails was because it was all too hard (something we'd guessed - which was why we were talking to Alkira by then). I think that if we'd been happy to settle for something totally standard, with maybe an internal wall moved here & possibly some extra tiling or an extra wall-niche added, Rawson may have been the cheaper option. But as we never got a complete tender I'll never know; also, some of Alkira's display home fitments may give a (possibly incorrect) feeling of them being expensive, I know that their admin people have groaned when I mentioned the flooring in that Elyse 15 'cos so many people like it & then so many people are turned-off when they find-out just how much it costs (and I noticed at Homeworld South they've stuck with much more standard spec interiors - probably for that reason). Re: Are you building with Alkira? 37Nov 14, 2013 3:19 am Hope you are all going well with your tenders and planning. I'm very curious to know who has been through a build with alkira, and what there experience has been like? Would be very keen to speak to anyone who is in this stage of a build! Re: Are you building with Alkira? 38Nov 14, 2013 7:33 am doohan777 Hope you are all going well with your tenders and planning. I'm very curious to know who has been through a build with alkira, and what there experience has been like? Would be very keen to speak to anyone who is in this stage of a build! They don't seem to be volumey enough ... only a few of us around, and I've never seen a comment by anyone actually in the process ... can you wait 8 months or so? A few Alkira employees have offered to give me addresses of current builds around my area, at various times since we started the process. I just keep getting sidetracked onto other stuff & forgetting to get that info (plus, to be honest, it wouldn't do me much good at this stage). However, maybe you could ask for the same & then approach those owners? Re: Are you building with Alkira? 39Nov 14, 2013 8:21 am Hi doohan777, I am waiting for building approval atm There is an Alkira Elyse - Malbec facade being built a few streets away from my property. I am also building the Elyse but Corvina facade, although very similar. It has been very interesting seeing the build go up, looking at the brick choices they made, seeing the process week by week etc Their house has gone up pretty quickly and it looks great, which gives me some peace of mind. I haven't been able to chat to the owners yet though. I've gotten a few people tell me that getting through the paperwork with Alkira might be tedious but once they start building, they can build the house blindfolded. I hope this is the case. Re: Are you building with Alkira? 40Nov 14, 2013 8:49 am Chumlee I've gotten a few people tell me that getting through the paperwork with Alkira might be tedious but once they start building, they can build the house blindfolded. I hope this is the case. Given that we've done all that stuff & signed the final contract a few months ago & handed-over an empty block 2.5wks ago ... I really hope what you've heard is correct!! Looking to start the journey of becoming an owner builder in SA. Feeling pretty (overly) confident on the building and construction details, but really struggling to find… 0 8424 No. It's not original. Circa early to mid 90s would be my guess and maybe even as late as early 2000s 1 6636 A question. Im in Queensland and building a new home. We managed to reach practical completion 6 weeks ago but we haven't heard any date for handover yet. Who should we… 0 5814 |