"AFTER CARE ... WE'LL DEAL WITH IT WHEN IT HAPPENS."

The most expensive sentence in new housebuilding?

"We'll deal with it when it happens."

It's understandable. You're running a business in a difficult market. Cash is tight. Build costs are high. Sales aren't moving as quickly as you'd like.

And you're certainly not going to employ another member of staff to sit around waiting for homeowners to report problems. So, you do what thousands of businesses do.

You absorb it.  The site manager deals with the odd snag. Someone in the office answers an email. The contracts manager makes a phone call. A subcontractor gets sent back to site.

And somehow, everyone gets through it. Until they don't. Because aftercare doesn't arrive as one big, predictable cost. It arrives as noise.

• An email here

• A phone call there

• A homeowner who hasn't had a response

• Another who wants to know when someone is coming

• A subcontractor who says it isn't his responsibility

• A site manager who is trying to finish the next phase

• And a customer who is becoming increasingly irritated.

None of these things look particularly serious on their own. That's precisely why the "we'll deal with it" strategy is so seductive.

But collectively, they consume management time, site resources, subcontractor resources and, increasingly, senior management attention.

And there is another problem.

You don't control when the demand arrives.

• You can budget your build costs

• You can budget your sales and marketing

• You can budget your professional fees.

  
  

But if your aftercare process is essentially reactive, you're allowing an unpredictable stream of work to compete for your most valuable resource: people's time.

And when something goes wrong, the cost isn't simply the cost of fixing the defect.

It's:

• Finding out what the problem is

• Deciding who is responsible

• Contacting the contractor

• Arranging access

• Chasing the contractor

• Updating the homeowner

• Dealing with further correspondence

• Escalating complaints

• Managing the customer's expectations

And that's before anyone has picked up a hammer.

The uncomfortable truth?

"We'll deal with it when it happens" isn't a cost-saving strategy.

It's simply a decision to accept an unknown future cost. But, there is a better way.

Take the unpredictable element out of it. Put a proper process around it. Have someone whose job is to manage it. And know what it costs you.

That's what outsourcing aftercare can do. Not because developers can't manage aftercare themselves. Because they have better things to do with their people.