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)
