Buying off plans and worried about build quality

A

albob

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Hi,
I am buying off the plans. We have seen a show house and that seems fine. However this weekend I went to visit 2 developements, previously built by the builders, and am now a bit worried about the whole thing. First of all neither developement had walled in front gardens, which will be the same as ours. This seems to have the definate drawback that if your neighbours dont kep their front patches tidy, then no matter what you do, it will drag yours down too. The 2 we saw were so bad i can only assume that they were mainly rental and thus garden upkeep is at a minimal. Has anyone here got "open" front gardens. How do you find them? (I know this has more to do with neighbours rather than builders). As our developement is staged payments I would hope that would turn off investment (=rental) buyers ?)
Secondly a lot of the houses seems to have a lot of moss growing on their roofs. As they were at most 6 years old, this surprised me. Is moss growing on slates a sign of something or just to be expected?
Regards
Albob
 
none of what your described is build quality, stuff like cracks, doors falling off, crappy plaster, cracks in the soffits, drainpipes in tatters....

thats build quality.

What YOU saw was common or garden Irish Scum Landlordism where the landlord shows no regard to the neighbours. .
 
Sounds to me like the houses you seen were badly maintained by the owners.

If you're concerned about your next door neighbour's garden would you not consider building a wall/fence yourself? I wouldn't let something small like this put me off buying a house unless there are other probelms with the development.

Also, although it may put some investors off, I can't see stage payments being a major detterant (so spelt that wrong!).
 
Hi,
I accept the first issue is not build quality, but roofs covered in moss after <6 years. I never thought people had to do much maintanence on their roofs! Thought that it could be issue with materials used or......
I was missing the day they thought "how to Build a House" in school so extremely green on DIY stuff.
Albob
 
Re the open lawn. I would check that you are allowed to build walls/fences, It seems a lot of LA prefer them "open" nowadays and (as it the case with ours) we have to leave them that way

Our front open lawn is the only thing I hate about our house, It is constantly used as an dog/cat toilet, including dogs on leads as the owners have no decency at all ( I have lost count of the amount of times I have had to run out and shout at owners standing there watching while Fido poops on our property, I usually ask them if they would mind if I took a cr*p on their lawn - I don't mind coming over deranged if it makes them stop!) Kids will use it as a playing field and frequently our window sills were park benches for them, we had to put large shrubs in planters outside our windows to stop that and give us some privacy. A lot of people have either paved them over which looks ugly or dug them out and put loose pebbles in, which looks nice except when they end up all over the street.
 
albob said:
Hi,
Has anyone here got "open" front gardens. How do you find them?
Albob
Click to expand...

Yes and they're a bloody disaster! Where I live this was conditioned by the LA. Huge downsides: unless your neighbours care it can fall on you to cut and maintain the grass! I'm a great beliver in the maxim: "good fences make good neighbours". Privacy is an issue as well. The only upside is that it can look well when people do maintain their little patch.
 
The thing about buying off the plans is that you have comitted to buy something which you dont fully see until its completed. Some of the things you should really look into are:

Aspect: What direction will the house be and will it be overlooked at the back?
Level: our house was on a much higher level than the houses behined us which effectively emant that we weer looking down into their back garden. We had to go to enormous cost to build a wall at the back of our house to block out the neighbours back garden
Garden: Our back garden was not level - far from it - there was a big slope on it - again we had to go to aenormous cost to back-fill the garden and make it level.
Time Frame: it could take a long while before not only youre house is complete, but before all the houses are complete. until they are, the builder wont finish off the road / footpath / landscaping etc of the estate.
 
Hi,
thanks for all the replys/advice. I have contacted the auctioneer (not stating who I was) and asked about investment properties in the area. I was told that in the estate I have actually bought that they are more residential people buying at the moment, and other estate were named for being where investors were buying. That is good news (I think) as at least it lowers the chances that the houses around me will be rented! Owner/occupiers are more like to maintain their own patch I would assume (Not always I know! :))
As for the things we cant see, the land around it looks pretty flat so would assume a relatively falt garden. And I have already determined that we have a south facing garden. Unfortunately we will have another house behind us, but I suppose thats more common than not. I am hoping that because we are in phase 1, of 3, that the builders will want to do up our phase 'nicely' in order to attract buyers in for the other phases.
Thanks,
Albob
 
albob

A word of advice, when buying off plans, make sure you look at the show house in detail, get in writing things that you expect to have in your house, its amazing the number of things included in the showhouse that the builder forgot to included in ours, Our discussion of what we expected was all verbal, we had no written details of house. Also missed fact that the doors open into the kitchen rather than into the garden.

I suppose just finding faults now, even snag list dond and just want in.

best of luck
 
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