bad builders houses of cards · 2017-11-05 · how far our new-build numbers fall short of what’s...

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OCTOBER 28 2017 LISTENER LISTENER OCTOBER 28 2017 13 12 A lmost two years elapsed between when work started on Shaun Giddy and Marina Lanza’s house and the day they were able to move in – and it still isn’t finished. In fact, they’re not sure if it will ever get a Code Compliance Certificate, the final sign-off from the local council. The process of building their family home in the pleasant East Auckland suburb of Glendowie turned into a horror story as they became caught up in the slow demise of Cranston Homes, owned by Blair Cranston, a former president of the self-regulating industry body Registered Master Builders. Giddy and Lanza interrupt each other as the story comes tumbling out. “Sorry, we’re all over the place with this,” Giddy apologises. “We’ve essentially had two years of sleep deprivation.” Building a house should be among the most exciting undertakings of your life. Not for you the dilapidated do-up with mouldy bathroom, draughty joinery and patterned carpet so old it should be in Te Papa. You want to move into a shiny new home designed to your specifications and fitted out with all the mod cons. One upside of the housing crisis is that, for an increasing number of Kiwis, this dream is the reality. Commentators may argue about how far our new-build numbers fall short of what’s needed, but nearly 29,000 new houses, townhouses, flats and apartments were consented in the year to June. Mush- rooming subdivisions in Silverdale, Porirua and Selwyn attest to the fact that many New Zealanders are choosing building as a means of climbing the property ladder. But for many hopeful homeowners, the dream has turned out to be an emo- tional and financial nightmare. One west Auckland woman has been left with an unfinished home after two and a half years of tussling with her insolvent builder and fending off blackmail attempts by out-of- pocket suppliers. One tradie even obliquely threatened her and her children. The woman did not want to be named, because she is still battling her builder’s industry association to claim on the peace-of-mind guarantee she thought she had bought. WILD WEST There’s nothing new about substandard workmanship or fly-by-night operators who disappear before problems show up, but the fragmented residential-construction sector has more in common with the Wild West than many realise. Anyone taking on the challenge of building a new home could be forgiven for thinking a warranty will protect them from the cowboys, but as with so many other aspects of the sector, the provision of build- ers’ warranties is completely unregulated, and many of those that are available leave consumers woefully exposed. Tales of homeowners left high and dry by an incompetent or cash-strapped builder who then struggle to get relief under their so-called guarantee are common. In one recent case, an Auckland homeowner had HOUSES OF CARDS Building a house is an enormous and complex undertaking. Yet thousands of would-be homeowners are being left woefully exposed by substandard builders’ guarantees. by MARIA SLADE photograph by KEN DOWNIE BAD BUILDERS One woman has spent two-and-a-half years tussling with her insolvent builder and fending off blackmail attempts by out-of-pocket suppliers. Shaun Giddy and Marina Lanza with their daughter Emilia: “We’ve essentially had two years of sleep deprivation.”

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Page 1: BAD BUILDERS HOUSES OF CARDS · 2017-11-05 · how far our new-build numbers fall short of what’s needed, but nearly 29,000 new houses, townhouses, flats and apartments were consented

OCTOBER 28 2017 LISTENERLISTENER OCTOBER 28 2017 1312

Almost two years elapsed between when work started on Shaun Giddy and Marina Lanza’s house and the day they were able to move in – and it still isn’t finished. In fact, they’re not sure if it will ever get a Code

Compliance Certificate, the final sign-off from the local council.

The process of building their family home in the pleasant East Auckland suburb of Glendowie turned into a horror story as they became caught up in the slow demise of Cranston Homes, owned by Blair Cranston, a former president of the self-regulating industry body Registered Master Builders.

Giddy and Lanza interrupt each other as the story comes tumbling out. “Sorry, we’re all over the place with this,” Giddy apologises. “We’ve essentially had two years of sleep deprivation.”

Building a house should be among the most exciting undertakings of your life. Not for you the dilapidated do-up with mouldy bathroom, draughty joinery and patterned carpet so old it should be in Te Papa. You want to move into a shiny new home designed to your specifications and fitted out with all the mod cons.

One upside of the housing crisis is that, for an increasing number of Kiwis, this dream is the reality. Commentators may argue about how far our new-build numbers fall short of what’s needed, but nearly 29,000 new houses, townhouses, flats and apartments were consented in the year to June. Mush-rooming subdivisions in Silver dale, Porirua and Selwyn attest to the fact that many New Zealanders are choosing building as a means of climbing the property ladder.

But for many hopeful homeowners, the dream has turned out to be an emo-tional and financial nightmare. One west Auckland woman has been left with an unfinished home after two and a half years of tussling with her insolvent builder and fending off blackmail attempts by out-of-pocket suppliers.

One tradie even obliquely threatened her and her children. The woman did not want to be named, because she is still battling her builder’s industry association to claim on the peace-of-mind guarantee she thought she had bought.

WILD WESTThere’s nothing new about substandard workmanship or fly-by-night operators who disappear before problems show up, but the fragmented residential-construction sector has more in common with the Wild West than many realise.

Anyone taking on the challenge of building a new home could be forgiven for thinking a warranty will protect them from the cowboys, but as with so many other aspects of the sector, the provision of build-ers’ warranties is completely unregulated, and many of those that are available leave consumers woefully exposed.

Tales of homeowners left high and dry by an incompetent or cash-strapped builder who then struggle to get relief under their so-called guarantee are common. In one recent case, an Auckland homeowner had

HOUSES OF CARDSBuilding a house is an enormous and complex undertaking. Yet thousands of would-be homeowners are being left woefully exposed by substandard builders’ guarantees. by MARIA SLADE ● photograph by KEN DOWNIE

BAD BUILDERS

One woman has spent two-and-a-half years tussling with her insolvent builder and fending off blackmail attempts by out-of-pocket suppliers.

Shaun Giddy and Marina Lanza with their daughter Emilia: “We’ve essentially had two years of sleep deprivation.”

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to pursue a claim on his Master Build Guar-antee through the courts, even though his builder had gone bust.

The provisions of warranties are generally weighted heavily in favour of the builder, and the exclusions and loopholes are big enough to drive a ute through. A significant criticism is that they lack independence – the Master Build Guarantee, the most popular product on the market, is provided by a wholly owned subsidiary of industry body the Registered Master Builders. Builders are effectively insuring themselves, which raises the question of what incentive they have to pay out on claims when to do so will hit them directly in the pocket. It also means the products have no external insurance backing, with no surety they will be able to meet their commitments in the face of multiple claims.

Often warranties will cover the work of

the builder only, not the whole construc-tion process. Loss due to defective design, specifications or materials will be excluded.

PRACTICALLY LAUGHABLEGuarantees offered by builders’ limited

liability companies are practically laugh-able. The average building company lasts only a few years; if your house turns out to have defects and the builder is no more, that

guarantee is worthless.Other countries, notably the UK and

Canada, have a mandatory system of guarantees, but the system here is entirely voluntary and, according to some esti-mates, as many as half of all new homes are constructed with no guarantee.

In the absence of a specific guarantee product, the Building Act provides a fall-back position, and the law does create implied warranties for all building work on residential houses, including a 12-month defect-repair period. But the problem is enforcement: consumers are left having to take those at fault to court, an expensive, time-consuming and stressful process, with no guaranteed outcome.

Consumer advocacy group the Home Owners and Buyers Association of New Zealand (Hobanz) has had plenty of “arm wrestles” on behalf of members who’ve

found themselves on the losing end of an inadequate building guarantee, its president, John Gray, says. A particular problem it has encountered is when master builders fail to pass on the guarantee documentation or fee to their industry organisation, so when the consumer goes to claim, they find they have no cover.

“We have long held the view that most of the insurances up until recently that have been available in the marketplace have been controlled by players in the market,” Gray says. “We say there should be a mandatory, independent, insurance-backed warranty and it should be for 15 years minimum.”

HOUSE OF HORRORSShaun Giddy and Marina Lanza, who both work in banking, signed with Cranston Homes in May 2015 to construct their four-bedroom house, and paid a $70,000

deposit. But it became evident early on there were problems. “Tradespeople [were] behaving like people who hadn’t been paid,” Giddy says. “I’m a chartered account-

ant; I know the signs.”Then came delays and excuses and

requests for extra money. Cranston was shuffling funds around to meet its

commitments, Giddy believes. “Eventually we got irate. It’s the usual story, he who shouts the loudest gets results.”

By September, four months after work started, the framing was up but there was no sign of a roof. In December, with no explanation, Cranston tried to switch to an inferior window supplier. Giddy and Lanza decided they had had enough. They laid a complaint with Registered Master Builders against Blair Cranston, and in the process discovered they did not have a Master Build Guarantee because the company had not filed the paperwork or paid the fee.

“That summer, we had nothing happen on the house for about three months,” Giddy says. “Zero.”

The couple gave evidence at a complaints

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The system here is entirely voluntary and, according to some estimates, as many as half of all new homes are constructed with no guarantee.

“Tradespeople were behaving like people who hadn’t been paid. I’m a chartered accountant; I know the signs.”

1. Giddy and Lanza at the house. 2. Holes drilled to install wiring after the lining had been fixed. 3. Giddy had to fit a makeshift panel between the floors. 4. Flooding caused by unfinished guttering. 5. Mortar spilt on doors. 6. Tiling laid before consent was granted may yet have to be taken up.

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hearing. Cranston was suspended from Master Builders and eventually expelled in December 2016. But even though Blair Cranston was once its president, the associa-tion told Giddy and Lanza there was little it could do to help them with the build. The pair were left wrangling with Cranston, almost on a daily basis, over every payment.

During the complaints process, Master Builders offered to issue a guarantee to the couple. “That was all that really came out of the hearing for us, because the rest basically left us in a much worse position,” Lanza says.

CONVOLUTED SYSTEMGiddy and Lanza had been told they had to continue to settle bills through Cranston Homes, because paying suppliers directly would void the guarantee. So they used their professional skills to enforce a convo-luted, time-consuming system of payments to make sure the money was reaching the tradies working on their site.

It didn’t always work, and a number of suppliers resorted to blackmail. One elec-trician threatened to remove the mains cables unless they gave him an extra pay-ment. The couple managed to persuade the original window company to return and paid a $23,000 deposit, but despite this, the firm initially refused to supply the joinery as leverage over Cranston for other unpaid jobs because they knew Giddy and Lanza would go “ballistic”.

“Which is exactly what happened,” Giddy says. “It’s an example of the guaran-tee actually causing [us] more problems.”

What angers Giddy the most is the thought of what would have happened if he had not had the know-how to do battle. He estimates they are $50,000 over budget – “and that’s an absolute miracle” – but without their professional background “we would have been shafted, absolutely shafted”. They know of other Cranston Homes victims in a much worse position.

Through long, late nights and thanks to sheer bloody-mindedness, the couple got their home to the point where they could move in, but there’s still plenty to complete and fix.

They have been able to claim for non-completion on their 11th-hour Master Build guarantee, but not before the organisation tried to insist on a confi-dentiality clause and a termination of the agreement, meaning they would have had no ongoing cover for defects.

Cranston Homes finally went into liqui-dation in May, and the fallout continues. The week the Listener spoke to the couple, they had received a bill from the liquidators for $108,000. Their lawyer is onto it.

Lanza, originally from Sicily, knows a thing or two about dysfunctional admin-istrations. “The whole thing is absolutely

a joke,” she says. “We have to pay the barrister, we have to pay for this, we have to pay for that. It’s incredible. What is the point of this Master Build Guarantee?”

She believes the industry association used their complaint to rid itself of Cran-

ston. Her husband’s view is that the Master Build Guarantee is used in conjunction with the Master Builders’ standard con-tract to give the builder leverage over the customer.

His recommendation to anyone build-ing a house is to spend money on hiring a specialist property lawyer to scour the project documentation for ambiguities. But he laments a system that leaves the con-sumer in this position.

“The answer is always to spend a fortune on lawyers, and there’s no guarantee.”

MANDATORY WARRANTIESThe Government is considering whether to introduce a system of mandatory builders’ guarantees, and a public discussion docu-ment is due out shortly. But there is an element of self-interest in its move. Land-mark weathertightness claims, such as the Nautilus case, in which Auckland Council was ordered to pay $25 million towards repairs of the leaky Orewa apartment build-ing, prompted a proposal to cap councils’ liability in such situations. The argument is that if councils’ responsibility is limited, consumers need some other kind of back-up protection such as mandated warranties. But there’s a lot of water to flow down leaky walls before that matter is decided.

When Duncan Colebrook, a British insurance broker with 40 years’ experience, moved to New Zealand in 2011, he was shocked at what he found. When he went house-hunting, he “stumbled across this whole disaster of leaky buildings and plaster homes and so on”. He was amazed that New Zealand has no system of mandatory build-ers’ warranties, which have been required in the UK for decades, and saw a gap in the market for an insurance-backed building guarantee that covered homeowners for all eventualities. The Stamford Insurance 10-year Building Warranty was born, backed by Lloyd’s of London and designed with the help of Hobanz.

“I went and found underwriters in London through my own contacts who do this kind of business in the UK, Canada and other territories,” Colebrook says. “It’s not like I invented it; I adapted [the product] for New Zealand from established practices and underwriters.”

In the UK, you’re not allowed to have the kind of exclusions some providers have in guarantees here, he says. “We’re providing the customer with a comprehensive policy, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s the architect that screwed up or the product manufacturer who sent out a faulty batch of materials or the builder who failed to install something properly.”

The industry here is far too lightly regu-lated, and there is no justification for the providers of cover being owned by the build-ers they are covering, he believes. Without insurance backing, there is no telling how the products would perform in the face of major claims, Colebrook says. “If you make this an insurance product by law, there’s already a lot of legislation around how insur-ers have to behave towards policy holders.”

Registered Master Builders chief executive David Kelly is not a fan of a compulsory warranty scheme. He believes it would drive up costs, among other unintended consequences.

NO CONFLICTHe rejects the accusation that his organisa-tion’s scheme has an inherent conflict of interest, saying it offers a package of services to buyers.

“The fact that we own the guarantee com-pany means we go the extra mile to make sure we look after our customers, because if we don’t, our brand gets damaged,” he says.

There have been claims that, technically, it could have turned down, but it instead decided to do what’s fair, he says. “Com-pare it with, say, an insurance company:

they don’t take the same approach at all, in my view.”

Asked whether the scheme could sustain major claims, he points out that the asso-ciation has been around for 25 years and dealt easily with the high-profile collapse of Stonewood Homes last year. Kelly says Stonewood left behind 110 homes under construction and another 150 with claims for remedial work, and Master Build Services was able to settle claims on them all.

The scheme meets the Reserve Bank’s solvency requirements and has an inde-pendent actuary, who reports to the board on its financial strength, he says. “I’m very comfortable with where we’re at.”

He denies that builders commonly fail to pass on the paperwork to set up the guarantee, and says the product does not cover aspects such as poor design because its purpose is “unashamedly” to focus on the workmanship of its builder members.

Kelly will not discuss the expulsion of Cranston from the association. Nor will he talk about other examples of members who have found themselves in trouble, such as Auckland builder Adam Partridge, whose company, Shore Homes, collapsed in December 2016, just three years after his

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Registered Master Builders chief executive David Kelly: not a fan of compulsory warranties.

“We say there should be a mandatory, independent, insurance-backed warranty and it should be for 15 years minimum.”

The law creates implied warranties for all building work on residential houses, but consumers are left having to take those at fault to court.

✔Be informed. The way the New Zealand residential construction sector is set up places a large burden on the consumer to be cautious. Building a house is a complicated job, so you need to take the time to become as informed as you can about the construction process, your obligations and your rights.

✔It will take longer than you think. If the builder promises you’ll be in by Christmas, expect delays. Most houses are bespoke builds, which means tradies work in fits and starts on various jobs, and you may be affected by the current shortage of skilled labour. Equally, shortages in building materials may leave you waiting for supplies to arrive.

✔It will cost more than you think. Unless you are extremely disciplined, it is alarmingly easy for costs to creep up, says Mark Graham, publisher of Building Guide. The budget for the tiles was $80 a metre but suddenly you see ones you simply must have at $130 a metre. Do this on a few items and you will soon have added thousands to the job. Design variations are also expensive. They may require amendments to the building consent with associated time and process-ing costs, and since you’re already committed to the build, contractors can charge what they like to make the changes.

✔You will need to make many decisions. Building a home requires you to think about things you’ve never considered before, from bathroom taps to the position of the coat hooks, particularly towards the end of the project when the finishing is being done. Be prepared to be called onto the site several times a day to make decisions.

✔The demands on your time will be enormous. If you haven’t already worked it out, building a house can be time-consuming and frustrating, and is likely to cause you stress.

Buyer beware: a building guideFirst-time homebuilders have to deal with decisions they never thought about.

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previous enterprise had failed. Kelly will only say Registered Master Builders has stringent criteria for membership, including considering a builder’s solvency, workman-ship and track record.

He does admit, however, that there was debate at the association’s last annual meet-ing about whether it needs to tighten up on how long a member should be excluded after a business failure.

He defends the requirement that a home-owner must continue to pay the building company even if it’s in obvious financial difficulty.

“If they go directly and start paying the subcontractor, then they’ve broken the con-tract … Then you’re on the back foot, and

you might find you end up paying twice. It’s actually to protect the homeowner. The important thing is that if people have taken out a guarantee, we will stand behind them. If things really turn to custard they will get their home built, but [the guarantee] can’t magically resolve all of those situations.”

Master Builders began using the inde-pendent disputes resolution service FairWay Resolution 18 months ago, and Kelly says that since then, it has had good success rates in settling disputes.

The country’s other main building trade organisation is New Zealand Certified Builders (NZCB). It offers the 10-year Halo Residential Guarantee that is also backed by Lloyd’s of London. The cover is com-pulsory for all members whose residential building work is worth more than $30,000, and aligns with Government regulations introduced in 2015 requiring a contract for all jobs that are more than this amount.

NZCB used to offer Homefirst Guarantees,

backed by CBL Insurance, on a discretionary basis, but moved to the Halo scheme and made it compulsory 18 months ago after a formal review, chairman Brent Chatterton says.

“We basically decided to go with a better product … The backing was a lot more sub-stantial than we’d previously had. It became more of an insurance than a guarantee, in some ways, that the homeowner could make a claim on and we’d also protect the NZCB brand.” Since then, Homefirst has lifted its game substantially.

NZCB is proud of its point of difference in providing compulsory warranties, Chat-terton says. He concedes, however, that a mandatory national system would be good for the industry.

Jim Rickard, director of building indus-try insurance agent BuiltIn, which provides the Homefirst Guarantee, says there have been recent improvements to the product, such as an increase in its cover for defects, loss of deposit and non-completion. “It’s evolution, because there are no legislative requirements as there are in most jurisdic-tions around the world.”

Rickard welcomes proposals to make builders’ guarantees compulsory. “I think it’s long overdue, frankly, that there are at least minimum requirements to protect the homeowner.

“If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, insurance should be underwritten by an insurance company.”

WHAT’S IN A NAME?When Lynn Earl signed with Signature Homes to build two houses on Auckland’s North Shore, she had no idea she was actually dealing with Lasque Construction.

On close inspection, the contract reveals that the builder of the townhouses next to her old family home in Glenfield was the Signature franchisee Lasque, but that was never the impression Earl had. “The house where we went to sign everything was Signature, all the cars were Signature, the letter says ‘Welcome to Signature Homes’,” she says.

She only became aware of Lasque when she tried to take Signature Homes to the Disputes Tribunal. “The adjudicator just flapped her hands and said, ‘You’ve named the wrong party.””

Earl has barely a good word to say about the process of building two new homes, one for herself and her husband and the other for her daughter. She recites a litany of poor workmanship: a steel support beam was left out of the garage roof in Lynn’s house, leaving the lounge above unstable, and when the builders returned to fix it, they fitted the new beam so close to the garage-door opening mechanism that the door no longer closes properly; workmen damaged the waterproofing on the deck of her daughter’s house and water leaked

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“If they go direct and start paying the subcontractor, they’ve broken the contract and might find they end up paying twice.”

1. New Zealand Certified Builders chairman Brent Chatterton. 2. GJ Gardner operations manager Dan Oliver. 3. Duncan Colebrook. 4. Mark Graham, publisher of Building Guide.

1. The Earl houses. 2. Cladding is coming adrift. 3. Downpipes are leaking. 4. Deck flashing is rough, and leaks. 5. Guttering is rusting.

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into the bedroom below; sealants on the roofs of both homes failed, leading to leaks in upstairs bedrooms and bathrooms; the plasterboard in the cupboard under the stairs of Lynn’s house had been nailed into the water pipes, and as the nails rusted, the walls and carpet gradually became soaked.

“It just went on and on,” Earl says. “I don’t know how I kept my sanity.”

Problems continued to emerge for several years after the homes were completed in 2007. Earl had a Master Build Guarantee, but when she contacted the organisation, she was told she was better to deal with Signature directly. But Signature said many

of the problems were not structural and therefore not covered, as the group only offered a two-year guarantee for defects.

The last straw was in 2014, when the clips holding the guttering in place on both homes failed. Earl contacted Signature about the problem 28 times between September 2014 and March 2016, and received only a couple of replies.

By the time she realised it was Lasque Construction she needed to target and the Disputes Tribunal hearing was rescheduled, Lasque had gone into liquidation. There was no one for the Earls to make a claim against.

Earl hand-delivered an eight-page letter and pictures of the defects at her properties to Signature Homes founder Gavin Hunt. “I asked him, ‘Are you proud to say this is your company?’” She did not receive a reply.

Hunt is a regular on the nation’s tele-vision screens, fronting advertisements for the housing franchise and its sponsorship of popular soap opera Coronation Street. He is adamant all the group’s obligations to Lasque Construction clients were met.

“We’ve spent a fortune working on old Lasque clients’ homes. If we’ve got a responsibility, we usually deal with it. There

are usually two sides to these stories,” he says.

In 2008, shortly after the Earl homes were built, Signature launched its own Home Completion Guarantee product and left Master Builders.

Signature claims its guarantee is the best of its type in New Zealand. It says it is financially independent of the Signature Homes franchise builders, and offers unlimited cover for loss of deposit, non-completion of the home, structural and non-structural defects and weathertightness.

Signature’s guarantee is provided by Residential Indemnity Ltd, a company owned, through a string of other entities, by Hunt and his business partner Lance Wiltshire.

Signature says the maximum cover available is the cost of completing a home to the original specifications, as long as all of its claims at that time do not exceed the limit of its performance bond (a type of guarantee provided by banks).

Residential Indemnity is backed by a total $1 million performance bond, or guarantee, issued by ANZ. That’s about the value of one average Auckland residential property.

Hunt denies that if Residential Indemnity received claims of more than $1 million it would not be able to pay out, saying the scheme is also supported by cash reserves. ANZ declined to comment on the bond, referring inquiries to Signature Homes.

TURN OF THE TIDEGovernment moves or not, the market for builders’ warranties is gradually evolving. The Listener knows of a number of building firms that are reviewing the cover they offer to their customers, because of uneasiness over lack of underwriting muscle and the level of protection the homeowner actually gets for the money.

Eighteen months ago, the largest home-building group in the country, GJ Gardner, made the switch from the Master Build Guarantee, among others, to the Halo guarantee. The group prefers Halo because of its Lloyd’s backing and because it offers better features, GJ Gardner operations manager Dan Oliver says.

“The level of underwriting of some of these products was a concern. Some of the schemes are essentially just fidelity funds [a fund members of a profession pay into] that accrue, or they’re performance bonds that are of limited value.”

The cover some products offer is paltry, he

says. For example, on a $1 million land-and-build package, the homeowner may have paid a 10% deposit plus a $50,000 deposit on the build contract. Halo’s loss-of-deposit cover is 20% of the build contract price or $500,000, he says. Compare that with the Master Build 10-Year Premium Guarantee, which offers 5% of the contract price or $40,000, or its Standard Guarantee, which provides 5% or just $20,000.

The Government has already made some improvements in consumer protections. In 2015, new regulations came into force requiring that any construction job worth more than $30,000 must come with a

contract and a full disclosure of the builder’s qualifications, licensing status and the insurance or guarantees they provide.

Still, the current environment places a heavy “buyer beware” burden on the consumer. Mark Graham, publisher of Building Guide magazine, says homeowners typically don’t read guarantee documents and simply put their trust in brands such as Master Builders.

There is a need for much greater consumer education about the issue, he says. A survey on Building Guide’s website found a third of people building or renovating a house hadn’t been given the prescribed information by their builder. Most were unaware of the 2015 regulations, and almost none had seen the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment’s booklet outlining the requirements.

“People are more interested in what kind of tiles they’re going to have on their bathroom wall than they are in making sure that they’ve got a decent builder … and they’re spending half a million dollars, a million dollars, on the biggest investment of their lives,” Graham says. l

Maria Slade is the author of Buyer Beware: A New Zealand Home Buyer’s Guide, published by Penguin Random House.

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✔Resist the temptation to manage the project. Your dream home is clearly your baby, but that doesn’t mean you know anything about managing a construction job. “We strongly recommend that the homeowner does not become the project manager,” says Building Guide’s Mark Graham. Let someone else do it, whether it’s your builder or a specialist project manager. Don’t underestimate how complex the process is – about a thousand different items will go into the building of your house and teams of tradies will be trooping through at various stages.

✔Follow the regulations. Many people are still unaware that, since 2015, build-ers have been required to provide a disclosure statement and standard checklist for work worth more than $30,000 including GST, or for any size of job if the client asks for it. The disclosure statement must include the legal name of their business entity, a key contact person, whether they are trading as an individual, a partnership or a limited-liability company, what insurance they have, and whether they are offering any warranties on their work. The checklist includes information about the contract essentials.

✔Don’t do it on a handshake. See above. Every job worth more than $30,000 inclusive of GST must come with a written contract. This should include a payment schedule, a dispute-resolution process and information about who does what during the build. Make sure you see the builder’s disclosure statement and standard checklist before you sign. It may also be a good idea to get your lawyer to look it over. The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) puts out a helpful booklet on all of this, called Know Your Rights: A homeowner’s guide to the consumer protection measures when building or renovating.

✔Choose your builder carefully. It is almost always the case that the cheapest is not the best, so do not let price be the determining factor in selecting your contractor. Do some basic googling and check out their reputation. Building companies often last for only a few years, so research the key people’s names on the Companies Office website to see if they’ve had previous business failures. And it goes without saying you should make sure they are following the mandatory requirements mentioned above.

✔Builders and tradies are not trained in customer service. The horror stories of tradies refusing to complete jobs until they are paid upfront are thankfully not the norm, Graham says. If you follow the steps outlined above, you should have set yourself up for a successful build, but you may come across gruff workmen who don’t give a fig about consumer protection regulations, he says. This is where you need to be well informed about the building process and your rights.

The biggest pitfalls A guide to the dos and don’ts of building.

The answer to the question of how many new homes we need to build to solve the housing crisis depends on who

you talk to.Estimates by ANZ Bank included in

a Treasury paper released in February showed a cumulative shortfall of up to 60,000 homes, including 35,000 in Auckland. However the Government disputed those figures, and claims the shortfall is between 10,000 and 20,000.

An Auckland Council- commissioned housing task force report said in June that the city needs an additional 13,000 homes a year but is building just 7000.

Latest building consent figures show supply is gradually increasing. In the 12 months to August, 30,736 new dwellings were consented, up 3.7% on the year before.

The 3166 new homes consented in August was the highest monthly number since June 2004, and was driven by a spike in apartments and retirement village units in Auckland, Statistics New Zealand says.

Housing by numbersHow many homes is enough?

Residential Indemnity is backed by a $1 million performance bond issued by ANZ. That’s about the value of one average Auckland residential property.

Left, an MBIE booklet helps owners of houses under construction understand their rights.

A survey on Building Guide’s website found a third of people building or renovating a house hadn’t been given the prescribed information by their builder.