Home and Builder Selection

Choosing a home builder is a crucial stage in home building, this can make or break your dream house and turn it into a nightmare. Coming from Asian background, we believe that a pleasant experience during the house building will pave the way for a pleasant and harmonious living in the house.

On our first visit to Woodlea, we also checked out their existing display houses. That time, there were only 2 builders, Mimosa Homes and Carlisle Homes, with their 4 display houses. Before that, we visited Metricon in Aspire Estate. A month after our land purchase, we also checked out the display houses of Metricon, Porter Davies, Henley and Boutique Homes in different display villages such as Taylor's Hill, Werribee, Point Cook, Sunbury, Mernda, Clyde North and Berwick Waters.

One important thing that we need to consider in choosing our home is the house siting in our lot. We have a good sized lot but the shape was a bit irregular, it has a huge frontage of 20 meters which tapers to 12.8 meters at the back. This was quite tricky with the house siting given the developers design guidelines.

We were also checking out the online reviews of these builders at productreview.com.au to see what their customers say about them.

Based on our display homes visits and customer feedback, we shortlisted Carlisle Homes, Mimosa Homes and Boutique Homes.

• Carlisle Homes
• Pros: 
• They have the highest customer rating online with a score of 4.6. 
• They have house designs that will exactly fit our land. 
• They have a very good promotion at the time we were selecting.
• We like Carlisle Homes.
• Cons:
• Their site cost was very high, at almost $34K.
• We heard that their upgrades cost is more expensive than other builders.

Some Carlisle Homes that we liked:

Amberley 27

Broadway 27

Arlington 27

• Mimosa Homes
• Pros:
• They have a good customer rating at 4.2
• They have an impressive display home at Woodlea.
• They charge fixed site cost of  only $10K.
• Cons 
• They need to modify the dimensions of their display home to suit our lot, or
• We need to choose the smaller version of the display home.
• The budget fixed site cost sounds too good to be true and the quality of the home might suffer.

The Mimosa Homes that we liked:

Saba 260

Rochester 277

• Boutique Homes
• Pros: 
• They have good customer rating at 4.2.
• My husband has a friend who built with them and she's very happy with her home.
• They have a house design that we like. 
• Cons:
• They couldn't fit the house size that we like, 28 sq and they can only fit a size 26 sq in our lot.
• Their promotions and inclusions are not as good as Carlisle Homes.
• The facade that we like would cost additional $17K.

Some Boutique Homes that we like:

Barcelona 28

Marseilles 28

St Tropez 28