Backstory - Dealing with the Sales People

Ok, this is the first of my "back-story" posts that fills in the gaps from us initially looking at Display Homes and Builder's Catalogues, to actually commencing work on the construction this week.  A lot happened and I will try to progressively post the story, as well as any advice I might have for those following in our footsteps.

 

This post tells the long (rambling) story of dealing with the Sales Representatives for several volume builders.

 

After spending a weekend looking through display homes, we contacted several builders to arrange appointments to discuss their homes and get their sales 'spiel'.  Marina arranged for several of them to come to our house, which several of them agreed to do, but we know now is not the preferred way they work.

 

Simonds Homes - "Busted Balls"

We christened the first sales rep we met "Busted Balls", and with good reason.  We had scheduled to meet him on a Friday evening at our house, to go through the plans of one of the display homes we had seen and liked.  I was running a few minutes late getting home and he was already waiting on our front doorstep.  I could see his car parked on the kerb outside our house and noticed that there was a woman sitting in it.

I introduced myself to him and suggested that he was more than welcome to invite is wife/partner into the house.  He said thanks, no, it's fine and that she was ok to stay in the car.

I have a feeling that this poor guy had expected the meeting to take 10, maybe 15 minutes - probably as long as you can reasonably expect to leave your wife in the car while you talk to clients.  "No trust me, honey, I'll be 10 minutes with these guys, 15 minutes tops!  Then I'll take you out for a nice dinner, just the two of us..."  But sadly no, we kept this poor man trapped in our house with our incessant questions for over an hour.  We even suggested to him, again, after about half an hour, that he might wish to invite her in to at least to get out of the cold.   But no, he said, she was fine and they were going out to dinner later.  He was really helpful, which was part of the problem - we were talking to someone who actually knew something about building and construction.

So anyway, I figure that when he finally escaped our house and got into his car, his wife duly tore his nuts off - hence his name.

Porter Davis - Mr "I'm not a Sales Person, I'm an Engineer"

The Porter Davis Fullerton 38 - Yep, we could see
ourselves living here

The second sales person we met was from Porter Davis.  We were quietly hopeful that this would be a good meeting, because we rather fancied one of the Porter Davis homes we had seen.  And on the plus side, he was really nice.  The downside was that he just a little bit useless when it came to being helpful.  His problem was that he considered himself to be "an engineer" rather than a salesperson, so pedestrian considerations such as actually walking a client through a display home to explain the details to them were somewhat beneath him.  His approach was that if we had already seen the display home, then we could simply tell him what we wanted and he could quote on that.  So we did our best to describe what we wanted and he (to his credit) took lots of notes.  48-hours later, we had the quote for our dream home.  More about what happened with Porter Davis later...

Carlisle Homes - Mr "No!"

We met with a representative from Carlisle Homes, who we quickly christened Captain No.  For him, everything was simply "No".

"Can we re-size the upstairs parents retreat?" - "No."

"Can we re-configure the ensuite layout?" - "No."

"Can we..." - "No."

Carlisle - Nice House, no flexibility

 

I freely admit that I am a persistent beggar, so I challenged him on exactly why he was not willing to discuss any alterations.  After all, most of the other sales reps were wooing us with their flexibility ("you want a toilet mounted on the roof? Why yes, of course we can do that!").  Turns out (according to him) that their tradies work off fixed plans and that varying those plans always causes issues.  Seriously, their tradies are that bad?  Anyway, with no flexibility, there was no future to the relationship, so we let him go and we dumped the Carlisle brochures into the recycling.

Carter Grange - Cool Guy

The guy from Carter Grange was really knowledge, nice and flexible.  Nothing witty or interesting to say really.  Carter Grange only build their houses with Hebel, so (in my opinion) all their houses look like low-rise office blocks.  They call it "contemporary", I call it "office block".  Check here for my thoughts on building in Hebel.

And Back to Porter Davis...

So we had a quote from Porter Davis and went back to the display home on which the quote was based that weekend and wandered around trying to make sense of what was quoted on paper - it made no sense.  Not knowing any better, we stuck our heads into the office at the site and asked a friendly-looking woman if she could assist us by showing us what in the house was on our quote.  And that was how we met Miriam.

 

We think Miriam is actually really great, but on our first encounter with her she was a bit of a bitch - at least at first.  She was really put out that we would ask her for assistance and actually told us off for not having arranged to meet our sales rep at the display home.  She added that it was not her job to show us through as we were not her clients.  We tried to explain to her that our so-called sales rep was actually an "engineer" who didn't take clients through display homes and she didn't believe us.  Then she saw the quote in our hands.

"Is that a quote?" she asked

 

"Yes", we said,

"How did you get that?", now Miriam was standing up, hands on hips

"Our sales rep emailed it to us."

"So he has shown you through the property, then?"

"No."

"How did he prepare the quote?"

"He came to our house."

"Your house?"

"Yes"

"And he has never shown you through the display home..."

"No."

Miriam paused, rolled her eyes and sighed, "Right then, let's start all over..."

We'll never know what else Miriam had to do that morning, but she packed away whatever she was doing, sat us down and then explained the process and proceeded to spend over 2 hours with us, showing us through the house and helping us prepare a new quote.

We pretty much decided there and then that we would go with that house and Miriam, (but boy did we make her work for it).

 

Making a Final Decision

Over the next three months, we ended up working with both Busted Balls and Miriam.  Much to their mutual frustration, we did not make a decision quickly and circled back to both of them repeatedly, asking for modifications to their designs and quotes.  While we were happy to play them off against each other, we were torn between choosing the two houses that Simonds and Porter Davis offered.  Our problem was that we loved the façade and presentation of the Simonds house (the Oxford), but found the interior a bit pokey and constrained for our needs.  On the other hand, we loved the interior of the Porter Davis house (the Fullerton), but felt the facades truly sucked.

The Simonds Oxford - We loved the Façade



The Porter Davis Fullerton-38 - We loved the Interior

Busted Balls was awesome in his responsiveness.  We asked him to quote to have the entire 2-storey house extended by exactly 960mm to accommodate our enormous dining room table and sure enough, 48 hours later, we had a quote inclusive of the engineering costs to this.

 

Miriam was different.  With Miriam, it was clear that her end goal was to get us to sign and that pretty much everything she did was oriented to that end.  There were a lot of changes we wanted to make to the Fullerton and we figured things out one step at a time.  Miriam probably had to draw up 10 different quotes for us.

 

But in the end we decided to with the Simonds home, not so much because of the service, but because to get the Fullerton to the layout we wanted (and we couldn't get a façade that we liked) we were starting to make substantial (and expensive) changes to the layout.  The Simonds design just seemed easier.

When we told Miriam where our thinking was at, she went into hyper-drive.  She started pointing us back to plans in the Porter Davis catalog that were not available as display homes.  She surprised us - she had been listening all along and was able to steer us towards one or two plans that actually better fits for our needs than the Fullteron.  She even admitted that she felt that the Fullerton was "limited" in its facades.

So just when we thought that we had made up our minds, we flipped again.  We started seriously looking at a design called the Wembley (all the Porter Davis houses have posh sounding names) and the more we looked at it, the more we liked it more than both Simonds or the Fullerton.

The story ends with us signing with Porter Davis to build a Wembley-35.

Advice

For what it's worth, here is my advice about working with the Volmue Builder Sales Reps through this stage of the process.

Work with 2 or more Builders at once - Even if you fall in LOVE with just one house, find two or three houses that you would be happy with and work with each of the builders through as much of the process as possible.  Things that one builder includes become the questions you ask the other and visa versa, meaning that you will quickly get a clear picture of everything you are getting (and everything you are not getting).

 

Don't be pressured into signing - the more work you do on your quote at the outset, the clearer your budget will be before you commit.  There are many things that the builders will advise can be sorted out "at tender".  But by that stage you are already more or less locked in.  Remember that this is possibly the biggest investment you will ever make, and all those little details can also be sorted out up front just as easily.

Ask for incentives to sign - sales people have monthly quotas, so waiting until the end of the month to sign des not hurt and always, always ask what would be in it for you to sign now (as opposed to, say, in 2 or 3 weeks time)