How long did it take you to choose your builder?

After 5 months of visiting display homes all over Brisbane, looking at many builders' websites, altering numerous plans to what I want and then having numerous meetings with a number of builders I've finally selected a builder.

What helped me make the decision? The plan was closest to what I was after, the salesman was very accomodating with all the changes I want to make and he was polite and patient. He also didn't waste my time.

I grew tired of sales people wanting me to sign up with them who wouldn't allow many, if any, changes, who simply didn't listen to me, who would make promises that they couldn't keep and the list goes on.

I'm enjoying the fact that I've selected my builder and house plan and now I'm just tweaking it.

We've been visiting the various display villages for 10 years.... When we were basically kids and building was our dream! They've since closed one of the Homeworlds and have opened another lol. We have been looking seriously for 12 months and about to hit tender stage with coral.

Our biggest issue has been finding a floor plan we like so we were open to all builders. We were set on the Chifley by Rawson but then the block we secured ended up being too narrow to add the butler pantry we wanted.

After never having walked in to a coral home we decided to pop in one day and so here we are at tender stage!

I have also found some other builders to be really difficult to deal with- one in particular wouldn't provide any info about price of on display upgrades until we signed up, and wouldn't provide scale drawings for us to play with mods.

I hope this tender comes back where we want it to. I couldn't bare going back to the drawing board!

it took us 7months and we've only just picked..

MrsJM - one builder I spoke to also wouldn't provide scale drawings either. I was told to print out the plan and use liquid paper to make the changes I wanted. I was told it only had to be a rough drawing but then my quote was based on this. I didn't draw it to scale and ended up having a shower that was 2.5 metres long and this was included in my quote. I also had some photos of bathrooms in which I liked certain features. Without listening to what features I liked the salesperson told me I was dreaming. Really? I just liked a recessed shelf in the shower. Found this salesperson too rude to deal with.

Oneskyabove - 7 months isn't too bad.

It took us about 3 months before settling on Plantation. Our first impression of Plantation was actually not great - my husband didn't like the dark colour schemes and all the timber. But after actually looking past the colours and looking at the plans and inclusions they became much more attractive. We ended up getting quotes from 4 builders - Burbank, GJ Gardner, Coral, and Plantation. One of my friends is building with Burbank, and the sales guy at Ormeau Ridge is a minor NZ celebrity, so I wanted to buy from them soooo badly...But we just couldn't find a design that had everything we wanted. Plantation were really patient and really listened to what we we liked and didn't like about each plan, and were never patronising. They helped us find a plan that met all our must-haves, didn't include any dealbreakers, and was in our price range.

One of the first displays we went in to with another builder, we really liked the display home but knew it was nowhere near our budget. We said to the sales guy "We know this one is going to be out of budget, but just out of interest can you give us a figure" which he did and then asked our budget, and then very patronisingly said "you shouldn't be looking at these designs at all, here's a brochure of our entry level designs"...He could have easily said "yes this one is a bit out of your price range, but here's a similar one in this brochure that may have what you need" or something, but he wasn't interested at all. The sales people definitely play a part, and it's hard to look past that, but first impressions definitely count!

About 2 weeks.

Took me and my partner only about 3 months of looking at Display home and speaking to builders before deciding on Rawson Homes. The sale person we dealt with at Kellyville was great (Paul).
I found a lot of the other builders were slack on keeping up communication, needed to be followed up constantly offered a relatively low base price but after extras, the final price tuned out very high.
Besides the tender presenter, who was in overtime sales pitch mode, the rest of the Rawson team have been a delight to deal with and we're close to laying slab.

Can I confess, basically less than a week? We loved the Livingstone floor plan more than anything else we'd seen, it fit our budget, we were impressed with Porter Davis' inclusions and when we checked out the display home we thought the build quality was great. We didn't actually look at any other display homes! We did do a fair bit of research in that week, it was basically all consuming but at the end of the day we're still very happy with the decision we made (although it's early days as the build hasn't started yet).

About 3 months, though I haven't signed up yet.

I started looking at displays in June last year. Bought land in July/August. Thought I had found my builder, but they stuffed me around on the quote. So I pulled out. I tried a lot of different builders, but ended up going with a small local builder, that didn't have any displays. So far so good, just working through the final parts of the contract so they will be ready to build at settlement.

We went looking at display homes before we actually got out land and just popped into the sales office to ask about land and signed up a block there and then. We chose out builder pretty quickly and settled on the floor plan that would work best for us and the best inclusions. We were also impressed with the sales woman who visited us at our home twice to go through the plans and estimate be used we just couldn't get to their sales office. So all in it took us 5 weeks from choosing out plot to signing with Sekisui. We are very happy so far, we did look at many others and very nearly went with Ansa who we thought were excellent too.

I'm glad I'm not the only one that made a quick decision!
My fiance had a week off from work so we spent that week visiting display homes and narrowing down where we wanted to/could afford to build and who we could afford to build with. If we didn't have that week, we probably would've taken a lot longer to decide (we don't often have days off together).