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I HAVE A CUNNING PLAN! THINK ABOUT AFTER CARE.

New homes completion process chart

There’s a serious side to this over used comic line. As developers, you do need a plan … for after care (don’t switch off, this couldn’t be more important). It’s not a cunning plan, just a really sensible one.


It’s time that after care cast off it’s Cinderella state and became a fully fledged grown-up aspect of developing. What, you claim it already is! Well, our experience reveals that it is usually where a developer needing to save time and/or money, will go first. It is too often perceived as something that can be sacrificed on the alter of ‘getting out of a fix’ – but statistics confirm that this is a falsehood … money saved now by cutting after care, merely cost you 3+ times more later. It’s just not worth it, it really isn’t.


So, back to the plan. After care needs a plan, otherwise it becomes an afterthought. And that never works. You need two things:


  1. Enough time added to the back end of your build programme to achieve various quality management stages.

  2. A sensible budget to pay for these stages (it is not a lot).

  

In 20 days and for £1K per plot you can protect against the worst of outcomes.


  • Check the build quality

  • Check snag work has been addressed

  • Provide a professional home demonstration

  • Provide 2 years after care and out of hours emergency cover


… that is not so hard to plan for, so why wouldn’t you do it? And then make sure that NOTHING is allowed to get in the way of delivering the programme.


There are 4 component stages to the plan:

  1. Quality Assurance Inspection – simply put, this is conducted after the contractor has conducted their own ‘build snag’. What’s the point? Because the contractor has been living with the project for 20+ weeks and they will have become blind to issues. So, get them to do their own snag first (and to address the issues) then send in your QA Inspector to see what they’ve missed (we guarantee that they will always miss stuff).

  2. De-Snag – this is after the contractor has addressed all your QAI snags. Again, they will miss stuff and you need to make sure that everything is picked up (not just most of it).

  3. Home Demonstration – a professional way to hand over a property to a purchaser. Ideally just before or just after legal completion. This is your opportunity to show them how everything works (don’t leave it to the site manager, they’re not that thorough).

  4. After Care – a 2-year package to handle all defects as reported by your customer, manage your contractors to get work done and provide registration for Out of Hours Emergency cover.


And it’s just 20 days! The most valuable 20 days you could provide if you want a happy customer and minimal problems in the two years that follow. And the entirety of this programme represents around 0.3% of the retail sales value of each plot. Surely, when put like that it’s a bit of a no brainer isn’t it?


After Build – the UKs leading provider of fixed-price after care. www.afterbuild.com

 

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