SecretSquirrel - In our first year (trying to get faults fixed) we spoke to over 50 new home owners from Charles Church across multiple estates, not ONE was happy with Charles Church. All had the same structural issue we were concerned with - a problem Charles Church has had since Persimmon ownership back in the 1990's. We also spoke to several Persimmon Homes owners (on some estates the two are side by side with identical house design, just different specifications, e.g. kitchens). We're nearing 5th year now
However, to give balance, Charles Church claimed 98% customer satisfaction - although never gave any suporting evidence of this. The house builders surveys we were sent for customer satisfaction were somewhat unusual, in that they were surveys within surveys. If you were relatively happy you filled in the first mini survey. If you weren't you got a second seperate and more detailed survey (many months later). I question if these match up together at the final tally.
With a director of Charles Church warning of effects on resale value if you complain too loud, and others in the company warning of repurcusions of complaining - plus ones own common sense of the effect on your home's investments value (should you need to sell/move) - many home owners are scared to let their issues get out in the open. This gives the builder an unfair advantage from the start. I won't go into how the NHBC extends this advantage even further
suffice to say what I discovered after buying from within the industrys' own professionals was a often repeated description of the NHBC as 'useless', and I can now fully see why and how the same problems repeat over and over within the NHBC claims process.
I found three types of owners; 1) Those who didn't know/understand issues with snagging/defects, 2) Those who had issues, but didn't want others to know and said things were ok, 3) Those that had issues and were pushing for works to be done.
Of those with ackowledged issues only a third were proactive in pushing forward - particularly when an honest independent investigation was required to really solve the issue instead of patching over with a builders recommended quick fix. But getting to the truth is very very difficult with any complex issues, and these can be estate wide problems. One issue took 4 years for a plausible solution - however the quieter home owners got something else, only the vocal/knowledgeable owerners got the better fix offered - an investigation within an investigation.
Tony - Bovis built a retainer into our contract on new property about 5 years ago. Although we found Bovis to be very good (room for improvement yes), but miles ahead of Charles Church. With Charles Church it's the attitude, arrogance, denials and lack of professionalism which comes from top down.
WillyJ - whilst I'd fully agree a good site manager would reduce number of issues over a bad one, I have two things to expand on. 1) Charles Church seems to have no concerns reusing a poor site managing, even when they have estate wide complaints regarding prior developments run under that same site manager, 2) Even if the site manager fails in his responsibilities, you'd expect customer services to put things right. We found customer services to be the bigger problem, and that was across the board within the company, and the higher one complains the worse we were treated.
