To be honest Clarendon and the Wisdom design are similar in size and layout. Plus their finishes meet our requirements so price is going to come into play.
I'm sitting down with both builders in the next week to discuss it all in detail. I hope Wisdom can come to the party or come inline with Clarendon if we try compare to apples and apples.. Let's see..
Hi Steve, I was in your shoes and I opted to go with Clarendon, because the land I wanted was being sold by them.
I must say that while Clarendon was quick on admin previously and Wisdom is not, Clarendon has been quite slow lately because they have taken on too much (I feel). Clarendon also has a lot of complaints during the build, whereas Wisdom has not.
It will be extremely difficult for you to compare the prices of Clarendon and Wisdom (believe me I tried with excel sheets and everything) - while the base price of Wisdom is higher, a lot of items in Clarendon are upgrade - one example I have been able to see based on stalking both forums is that for kitchens, Wisdom appears cheaper - my kitchen upgrade with Clarendon is costing $30k+, whereas with Wisdom it may have been cheaper - Clarendon uses Quantum Quartz for its stone, and has 5 basic colours, everything else is an upgrade. Wisdom appears to have more. For electrical, Wisdom appears to have the option of installing the downlights without the lights, whereas Clarendon does not. Also for tiles, you will need to know what is the standard range offered by both Clarendon and Wisdom to compare, same with bricks.
Also, one thing that Wisdom was selling (to me) as an advantage was that the same customer representative assists you during the admin stage. For Clarendon, you don't - once you sign the tender, you get sent to a tender presenter, and once you sign the contractor, you get transferred to a customer representative, and so on.
So in short, go with your gut or the design you like best. Remember the less structural or design amendments you make, the cheaper your build.
We also did 2 tenders for our knock down and rebuild - with Clarendon and Wisdom. I also compared the 2 side by side in an excel spreadsheet and found that Clarendon rates were going to be higher compared to wisdom's given the amount of exclusions and quality of build they were providing. We are on Wisdom's signature package (Majestic 35), and compared that with Clarendon's Boston 34. The 2 tenders had a difference of 2K, but Wisdom had many things included in it compared to Clarendon's. But then Boston was also a 34sq, but Majestic was 35. Other key thing for us was that Wisdom's CSR was pretty good and it just 'clicked' in our first appointment, whereas with Clarendon we never got that comfort feeling.
After going through the whole process we do feel that while good, but Wisdom;s CSR was still a bit rushed, and there were some gaps in communication or setting up expectation I must say. Couple of examples are like we were told it will be a heated ladder rail in ensuite, but it actually isn't. For colors, we were told that there are heaps of colors and we could pick any color during our appointment, but nowhere we were told that standard is only 1 color throughout the house. ohh well, but then CSRs are CSRs. Who knows what surprises we would have found through Clarendon!!
Our cost total cost is reaching just under 700K which includes everything such as landscaping, electrical, blinds, and so on, and we have done 25K worth of additional upgraded each for Kitchen and flooring. Landscape alone is 96K.
End of day, my feel is that they were both neck to neck, but we liked the plan of Majestic compared to any other plans.