I'm very happy to find out about this thread, have read lots of sharing here which give me both more knowledge and confidence in HHH - thank you.
I wonder if an oldcomer can share:
- ballpark cost to look at. At my very first visit, I went through initial discussion and price estimate was 525k, including some wishlist like ceiling height and high gloss kitchen, but excluding of course demo and driveway. Thats quite a lot. How much more should I allow for a moderate finish? What do people on this usually end up with roughly?
- I can recall many of you are in Ryde or North West. Anyone around Revesby area?
Hope I can join the fan club soon, if cost is in check
Hi BabyMichelle,
Following on from what Seren1ty has said it is so hard to compare costs between builds even with the same builder as site costs can vary so much. The items that have really pushed our build price up are demo and council requirements (stormwater, BASIX requirements) but these would have been the same regardless of who we were building with. One word of advice would be to look at many builders and really closely look at their inclusions and how realistic their provisional allowances are. From reading other threads on here it seems that many people get stung after they have signed and paid money and then provisional items increase hugely or site costs have been greatly underestimated.
The other thing that I looked at when choosing a builder was how long their builds usually take after you sign up. We wanted a builder that had a good track record of finishing on time with no unnecessary delays. We wanted to minimise the time we are paying rent and mortgage as that quickly adds up.
All the best with your investigations
Hi BabyMichelle, you already got some great advice from Seren1ty and kjane. Not much to add, just wanted to provide our perspective for going with HHH - we found HHH very flexible in changing their floorplans without incurring additional charges. We made so many changes to the Sienna floorplan it almost feels custom. We didn't find the same flexibility with other builders. HHH also have very good inclusions as standard. I did a comparison with 2 other builder inclusions and found the little extras provided by HHH made a difference, eg. flyscreens to windows and sliding doors, tiling to alfresco. The other main reason was the smaller number of sites that their Site Supervisors manage - this impacts how quickly they can build. We have a lot of new construction going on in our area, one of the houses around the block from us went with a large volume builder that we were considering, we found out their build took 2 years from demo to finish. I found it was quite common from this builder when reading other reviews on this forum. Hope that helps. Good luck with your research!