Home truths

As Stephen Nancarro pushes open the front door, it sticks.

“That’s one,” he says.

He closes the door from inside. “Look, you can see daylight at the bottom.”

Nancarro is managing director of a burgeoning business called Inspector Home which checks new homes – supposedly ready for occupation – for defects. It’s the latest advance in the struggle for quality in housing.

On this three-bedroom semi-detached house he finds 72 defects. There are problems with the windows in nearly every room; bare wood when you open one and look in the joint or badly fitted trickle vents. There are messy joints in the plasterboard on one wall and in the skirting below a radiator. Someone forgot to seal around the shower in the master bedroom’s en suite bathroom. And the list goes on.

Shocking, isn’t it? Well, no, actually. This house was pretty good. Although the number seems high, most defects were relatively small. Apart from a gaping hole in the outer wall behind the boiler that is...

A correctly finished house is very rare. A recent survey by insurer Zurich of 2886 new homes showed that 49.8% needed remedial work on their external doors. Heating and hot water, leaks, windows and seals in bathrooms are also big problem areas (see ‘Top 10 Defects’, below).

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Some houses are near perfect. Inspector Home awards special certificates to units where they only find between 10 and 25 minor defects (dependent on size). Last year it found five out of 1000 inspected. This year there have been 12 out of 1500.

The reason for poor standards in finishes comes down to two things: declining standards among tradesmen and inadequate supervision. Nancarrow bemoans the demise of the clerk of works. That role has been amalgamated into the duties of the already flat-out site manager.

Cutting out the clerk of works is a false economy, he says. Those bits of the window frame without paint, for example, will let in the water and within a year the frame could warp. The housebuilder will have to shell out for remedial work. But if the subcontractor has to rectify it before the homeowner moves in, he foots the bill to redo his shoddy work.

So which developers are getting it right? Well, it’s not down to the company, it’s down to the site manager. This point is illustrated by the fact that the winning site last year, with no defects, was a Miller job, And so was the worst one.

To find out what it takes to get it right, CM talked to two of the 12 site managers who have been awarded Inspector Home certificates this year. Robin Anderson of Millgate Homes is working on four houses worth around £1m each. Fairview’s Sean Carrigy has 97 units on his project. They agreed on many points and differed on a few, perhaps due to the different scales of their sites.

Top house builders can be ruthless. I’ve known them to sack the site manager on the spot

STEPHEN NANCARROW

Both men started on site as labourers and worked their way up. They are both 47 - the ideal age for a site manager, perhaps? Their years of experience mean that they can spot when people have taken short cuts. And they command the respect of the tradesmen. “I would never ask anyone to do something I would not do myself,” says Carrigy.

So how do our two model site managers get the most out of their tradesmen? Vigilance seems to be the key.

“You have got to keep an eye on them,” says Anderson. “If a particular trade is not performing I have got to make them do better. You have to speak to the relevant contracts managers at their company and get on well with all the trades that come to site.”

Anderson isn’t a shouter, he says, because it doesn’t bring the best out in people. But then he has the luxury of working with tradesmen he knows from previous jobs.

Carrigy, who has a greater turnover of people on his site, is a shouter when necessary. You’ve got to be able to read people, he says, to know who needs nurturing and who needs a rollocking. “You have to keep bawling, shouting and arguing. If it’s not up to scratch you have to keep saying ‘I am not accepting that’. You can get the standard but, it’s hard work.”

It’s important to insist on a tidy site. Nancarrow knows the moment he sets foot on a site whether he’s in for a defect-fest or not. He looks to see if the roads have been swept, if there are skips around, whether the men are wearing hard hats and high-vis vests. Carrigy says he caught some young joiners grafitti-ing the toilets the other day, so he gave them a pot of paint and told them to cover it up. “They said ‘but it’s a building site’,” he says. “I told them that I don’t accept that behaviour on my site. A clean toilet is a clean site. They found that strange. But it hasn’t happened again.”

Anderson says that enthusiasm is a necessary attribute of a successful site manager. He thinks this is even more important than experience. “I have always had passion for the job,” he says. “When I was a joiner and I hung a door it had to be spot on. I want them to have the same passion as I have. You’ve got to enjoy it.”

They make it sound easy. But Carrigy and Anderson are rare beasts indeed. So what can a house builder with less gifted site managers do to improve?

Fear factor

Check up on them, that’s what. Inspector Home, although it works mostly for individual home buyers, has a few developers on its books. Millgate Homes hired them because it wants to have better finishes than its competitors: “Our build quality is fantastic, but where the guys could lift the product is by looking through the eyes of the family purchaser,” says David Simpson, Millgate’s general manager. “They don’t have the training or the mindset to imagine what it would be like if they went round with their wife.”

One top 15 house builder for whom Inspector Home works has reduced its snagging defects by 45% over a two-year period and reduced its aftercare budget by 40%, says Nancarrow. It’s the fear factor. Inspector Home’s reports land straight on management’s desks so poorly performing site managers can expect to be found out. “These are ruthless people,” says Nancarrow. “I’ve known them to sack the site manager on the spot.” cm