Building in Aveley, Dale Alcock - Contracts Hiccup

Hi bevnic we don't have an ensuite currently either it's what I can't wait for in our build

My block is probably behind yours, so we already have a road on one side. I was there yesterday and I am cautiously optimistic that titles will be ready in a few weeks.

Very happy that settlement on our block went smoothly today!

Our building contracts and plans are being finalised now and we should have those by next week.

Exciting times all round.

Congratulations! Excellent news.

Hey Bevnic! We are building in the same area! Yay for titles! Have you done pre start yet? We are being told we might not get our meeting till after Xmas!

Congrats Bev. We have ours scheduled for tomorrow 2pm. One day late because we used a crappy broker, still excited though.

Congratulations, so much fun ahead of you

We had our pre-start a week ago and it was a great experience. We are getting lots of things costed so I will post details and pictures of our choices once we have confirmed they are able to stay!

I decided to go to the tile place direct to do our tile choices as I really needed guidance and had met a lovely consultant while we were window shopping. It worked so well going there, she helped me get my head straight about what we wanted. Also because we chose our tiles with them I got a discount card to pay for our floor tiles. We are doing the living, kitchen, activity and alfresco area after handover, so this has potentially saved us a lot of money. I couldn't be happier with our tiles, but I'm not sure I'm going to be happy with the price - we may need to compromise a few things.

Unfortunately, we had our first negative experience with our builder. Although I can't speak highly enough of everyone I have dealt with in the office, I was very disappointed in our sales rep. We live in the country so travelled 600 kms (there & then back) for 2 days for pre start, electrical & intelligent homes meetings. We had also yet to sign our contracts, as they were not ready until last Wednesday. I had offered to postpone our pre start to give plenty of time for the contracts to be correct but was told it would be fine. The contracts were at our Perth house when we arrived late Thursday, it took about 5 minutes to notice two large errors so I sent an email to see if I could arrange a time to go through them in order to ensure the errors were fixed.

My sales rep called me Friday at 1, I was at their offices at the time about to start the electrical pre start. He was also in the office and couldn't even walk out the front to see us to go through our concerns, he was pretty dismissive and made it clear if we didn't sign we wouldn't be able to do pre start. I felt uncomfortable and all I wanted was for him to make a few notes on the errors on the drawings for us to sign. Saturday morning we brought the contracts with us to sign, luckily our wonderful pre start lady was kind, understanding and highly professional. Unable to get hold of our sales rep she arranged another rep to help us sign our contracts, he was so lovely to take the time to help us and after he talked to us we were more than happy to sign.

I'm sure it's not unusual for clients to have difficulties with getting service from reps after they have signed and the rep has secured their commission. Sorry - rant over! It just soured what was such a fantastic and fun experience for us.

I can't wait to get our costings and then new plans, we redesigned the kitchen and I love love love it now! Hopefully I an afford the appliance upgrades!

Sorry to hear the negative experience. Hopefully it's the only bump on your path and at least the outcome is positive. It sounds like particularly lousy service from your sales rep, as I don't imagine they'd get their sales bonus until you actually start building. Perhaps they were just using your remote locationand limited time In Perth to their advantage.

I thought final contracts were after prestart? We've been told that a number of our requested internal changes (I.e. Changing wall positions, cupboard heights etc. ) would be costed at prestart. I'm not sure id be comfortable signing a final contract until I knew the final price.

I'm so sorry to hear you had an experience like this. I'd have felt quite uncomfortable too. I have to say we had a fantastic experience with our sales rep at DAH, I couldn't recommend him enough. When he passed us over to the construction team he told us to keep his number, just in case. He said he'd only ever gone in to bat for a client (when something went wrong) once in his entire career but it made us feel really 'safe', for want of a better word.

I'm glad your pre start rep was very supportive. Hopefully your experience with DAH will be positive from hereon out. Also, you should have the opportunity to fill out a questionnaire regarding your initial experience (we did ours at pre start) so make sure you give DAH appropriate feedback.

This is not good customer service from your rep.

Please check and recheck the costings. We had forgotten conduits for Aircon on cavity wall - if I hadn't remembered afterwards we would have been in problems. When I called they said I will only get the final electrical plans (which we would have to pay a variation fee to change). I wrote to them that I need to review everything before signing (I thought that was a reasonable request) - then they forwarded draft plans as per pre-start meeting. Not nice demanding things, but I am getting the impression that DAH is slightly better from an otherwise awful lot.

I haven't received our final contract - despite having pre start more than a month ago.

On another note, our blocks are almost complete - I was there yesterday and they now seem ready.

We had our initial sales guy leave the company before pre-start without even a courtesy phone call or anything to us. We found out when another sales consultant out of the blue rang us to sign off on our final plans. Then when we went into prestart (the earlier guy had always said he would be in the office if there were any issues he'd be happy to help) we had a few issues of things agreed to that weren't specifically documented and had no recourse because of course he wasn't working anymore and our new sales rep was on holidays.

My advice is get everything in writing and check and recheck.

Completely agree navs, I so wished we had got more in writing. Make sure you double check at each change in paperwork, we had things which had been agreed to and were in the first documents disappear in subsequent documents and things renamed which was very confusing to keep track of.
Good luck.

Hey Bevnic, has your build been held up? Apparently our block is waiting for water corp connection.. Was suppose to be finished early dec but now told two it's two more weeks away.. Makes it hard when I'm seeing other peoples slabs go down.

Mine was also slightly held up for the same reason Kelly. My CLO let me know just before the christmas break there was an issue with the Water Corp connection due to an issue with the developer diagrams (I assume an issue with the sewerage or water mains survey) which would take a few days to fix. (late December).

I then got a call back in early Jan from my CLO saying Water Corp had approved the connection and yesterday when I went out for a look there was a meter and tap on my block

If your block is in the same street/area as mine it must be very close to being able to be connected!

Hey Silvarbullit, thanks for the info.. glad I get info on here as nobody calls or emails me hope they make an effort to do so this week.

Hi Kelly,

I haven't heard of any issues so far. We are waiting on building approvals at the moment so still quite a while off construction. I hope they get things sorted quickly for you!

Nic

Hey Bevnic, how's everything going ?

Hi Bevnic

I love your Portico. Can you please let me know what the dimensions of the portico are.

Much appreciated
Tammy