Rarely see any reviews on Bentley Homes so thought I should share our experience as we go along to help anyone else considering them.
We are doing a KDRB in Melbourne eastern suburbs for Kyalami 370, Will update as we go along as our estimated finish time is October 2018. Finding a builder was challenging given the fall of our site is higher (3.6m front to back), most builders we saw wouldn’t do it.
The pre build process generally went ok, color selection etc was done ok, although given the time delay between this and site start a lot of what we chose ended up discontinued or otherwise unavailable so had to rechoose. But on the whole everything went ok and there was decent comms to keep us updated. I will point out 2 things though,
- Bentley like a lot of builders use the standard HIA contract, not much you can do about this but it is as you imagine, loaded heavily in favour of the builder rather than customer
- Despite the new rules in Vic against builders appointing building surveyors*, Bentley ‘highly recommend’ using the surveyor of their choice and make it very annoying (and costly) for you to not go along with them. I have a feeling this is common for a lot of builders, and this sort of practice defeats the purpose of having the rule in place which is meant to protect consumers. In the end we went along with what they ‘recommended’, and didn’t even bother appointing an independent inspector, as from what we heard even if you do get one, the builder has no obligation to effect any changes that your inspector puts forward…
I guess these aren’t complaints per se as they are common industry practice, but it is still annoying.
*See https://www.consumer.vic.gov.au/housing/building-and-renovating/plan-and-manage-your-building-project/domestic-building-consumer-guide