Saumiya Nathan

Review of MASTERTON HOMES PTY LIMITED

Our build experience so far has been not very good...

Our build experience so far has been not very good specifically into pre construction. Sales team helped us with selecting plan for build, though a lot was done during sales to finalise initial plans the details of finish and what the cost of that finish would mean could have been better covered in more detail. We are now in pre construction, appointment are very hard to get; with limited supplier consultants it seemed like a wait for 2 months to complete the overall selection process. We wish the external suppliers provided detail quotes on items, like flooring, kitchen etc so that we could have made better decisions more effectively. Our experience so far with pre construction process, has been average. The end to end process of this stage really needs to be revised, it feels as if is outdated. For example, we had to choose the bathroom tiles in December and had to wait till end of January to choose bathroom taps. It would have made more sense to us, if we had been able to choose bathroom taps and sink at the same time while we knew what our tiles style/colour were. Repeatedly we had to followup again and again on what the next step is, most of the time the team was not able to provide an ETA unless we followed up. It has been our experience so far with the delays that there is a lack of resourcing in Masterton's staffing and as a result everything is delayed from drafting team completing drawings in time to tender validation process. This week we have had an additional cost for BASIXs added to our tender without the cost ever being discussed or alerted during any of the past many months of plan discussions prior to CDC approval. When we questioned the cost, we are told it was missed out in the tender and now it is being added; there is no apology or making the customer understand where the miss communication has occured. So basically we now have an additional cost of $9k added to our build cost because they missed it few months ago when we signed off the original tender. Oversights like this is not a customers fault, and we expected Masterton to take ownership of this error. It has been difficult for us to find funding for another additonal expense on BASIXs, but had we been given the opportunity ealier when the plans were being finalised last year; the BASIX assessment should have been done at that point in time and cost quoted to us. We could have changed something to bring the energy rating down in the plan. Believe we had very high expectation in the process, but just got let down a few times in pre construction.