Quality of Package Homes

It’s mostly a function of cost. Mass builders have smaller margins (cheaper) so they cut corners to save time and money on things you don’t see. Waffle slabs, chipboard wall bracing, minimum frames, cheap 1st floor joists, paper square set cornice, starting interior fixing with just wall wrap, even cheap scaffolding that requires holes to be punched through wall brace. The subbies they use are based on availability not quality so the overall quality can have a large variance.

Their supervisors are usually building 15-20 houses at the same time and just don’t have the time to pay any attention.

Custom luxury builders are a lot more expensive, the good ones do take care with the build, they are slower as they tend to stick to the same subcontractors, the good ones will use plywood wall brace, thick support grade frames for internal doors, engage structural engineers to design raft slabs or custom foundation, actually use surveyors that criticises their work, do the house in the correct order (i.e. lockup with mansory before fixing), posistrut joists, metal internal angle for square set cornices, scaffolding that doesn’t damage wall brace etc.

Their supervisor are usually on 4-5 jobs tops and can spend a lot of time at each job.

You get what you pay for basically (most of the time).

Building your own, well unless you are in the industry, it’s going to be mega stress and you may find trouble finding sub contractors that will deal with one offs. You can engage a PM which may be a better way to go.

The only thing I'd disagree with kirashogun about is the use of only cheap materials by the volume builders. I think it's by "production line" design/build that they save money; most of the cost of building a house is in labour, and I think it's in labour-costs where volume builders attempt to save most of their money.

Our volume-builder house has metal square-set (non-)cornices & metal door-frames to match, for example. If it takes their plasterers less time to use metal than paper (didn't know there was such a thing!), then that makes metal cheaper for them.

In answer to the original question ... few volume builders will be as bad as the worst private/custom builders. But no volume builder will be as good as the best private/custom builders. At the lowest end of the price-scale I think you're better off with a volume builder; at the top end you're better off with a custom. It also depends on what you're after vs how much money you can afford, we were quoted double for a custom builder to build our house, the only single extra thing we would've had was under-floor solar hydronic heating & that's a comfort thing ... but we're very comfy in our project build, the quality issues have mostly been purely cosmetic & if we'd spent the extra ~$600k on the house we'd have well-and-truly overcapitalised (if I take the long-term view) while being barely any more comfortable.

Great posts from everyone. I have said this before "quality is a function of price" with a proviso that you can pay for quality and still get crap. No one has ever found a way to deliver Mercedes Benz quality at the price of Tata and that is universally true for all economy.

What project builders have worked out is that building cost per sq metre diminishes with size and building volume even more so.
So they packaged biggest bang for your buck and once reached serious volume then made a killing on market volume and market power.

Does anyone knows if Rawson Homes uses 450 or 600mm stud walls?

Thanks