Perceptions

Would have certainly re-considered building with another company if these comments were read previously, which mostly are a true to how this company performs and treats the owner

Investment in a independent inspector is required to record all works incomplete as well as recording poor workmanship which perception are always in denial

Perception do not follow through with any requests and fail to understand owners requirements for what is percived to be a qaulity builder this is extremely frustrating

General trades are Ok but with poor management, supervision and organisation, the works are messy and mostly non conforming to standards
Initial design and accomading service from Salesperson to suit change request
Purely concerned on getting as much profit out of the customer as possible with no regards to quality, schedule and customer satisfaction

Very poor customer service and unwilling to listen to any problems

Very contractually aware and use this to bully the owners in all matters

We built 2 houses with Perceptions because they had 2 designs which happened to fit nicely together on our block, and were competitively priced. Prior to signing up with them we did read reviews that were dominated by the theme of poor customer service. We continued anyway because of the price, the promise of a 10 month build and the belief that we could get sufficiently involved to overcome any customer service deficiencies.

Initially we were sold on a 10 month build by the sales person. This included being shown build schedules of past houses which were built in this time. Aware that things can easily blow out build times we resigned ourselves to being happy even if they went 4 months over this duration. So we proceeded and after a lengthy council approval process, based on Perceptions designs, we were given a contract with an apparently "standard" 18 month build duration. This is where the poor customer service began and never ended. In fact it would be better described as adversarial: the buyer is always wrong and will be made to know this. After meeting the General Manager and being told to contact him anytime, we could not get a response from him on the simple query of why the contract does not reflect what the sales people are promising.

The rest I will summarise in bullet points.

Positives:
- The house quality is very good
- The designs look great
- The assistance with the interior/exterior design was tops
- The building supervisor who came in at the end of the build, [Name removed], was awesome. He replaced the previous building supervisor who left the company. [Name removed] has been very committed to resolving all the prior build shortfalls and finishing the property off, and demonstrates high levels of customer interaction.

Negatives:
- The build took 17 months. Finishing took 5 months after lockup was achieved. Trades people came one at a time with large gaps of no work in between. Overall the build could have been easily finished in under 14 months if they had project managed it better.
- We were never given any indication of duration during the process (other than under 18 months).
- We had 3 different customer liaisons over the build because of high staff turnover.
- We only met the building supervisor once, 2 months prior to completion, just before he left the company.
- The last customer liaison was consistently adversarial and argumentative, rather than solution focused and helpful. We have folders of emails telling us why things cannot be done or why we are wrong. It would have been much better to acknowledge our questions/concerns and help find solutions. Particularly because we were often found to be correct after pressing on certain issues. This made the process very laborious and not pleasant.

Overall, I would recommend perceptions based on the quality and price of the build if you can ensure that building supervisor and customer liaison person are friendly, communicative and committed. I would suggest meeting them and talking to a current or past customer who they helped. The people that look after your build make such a big difference to the pleasurability of the experience, and presumably the length of the build.

I can't even express in words the way they deal with their customers; once you point out faulty or poor work (in our case brick work well below standards)they just threaten you and won't let you go on the building site....we have a site supervisor who can't or doesn't want to look at poor work , instead he turns it into something personal and makes threats.....can't believe this guy is allowed to deal as a customer representative for a big company. wish we had seen this site before we signed up.....we would have thought twice about choosing them.
seemed to be value for money, good service from sales rep.
extremely poor customer service once building starts, poor workmanship