New home considerations

People I know and friends, mostly enjoys looking and wanting to buy a brand new home. I think this is because we like the looks modern homes, enjoy being the 1st one to be living there and design it to what ever they like. From what i've mentioned in "Buying a house consideration", they are some other things you will need to consider when buying a new home. There are 2 types of brand new homes, which are:

• OFF PLAN - this is where you will look at the design and layout from a plan, select a plot and will be built in the near future (often you will have to wait months to complete). For off plan houses you will be able to choose certain fittings and designs like the tiles in the bathroom and kitchen, the worktop/doors of the kitchen unit, hob/oven, taps in kitchen and bathroom, handles on doors, etc. But bear in mind the deleveloper will give you a number of options which you can upgrade which will cost extra. Eg Carpets, kitchen upgrade, bathroom upgrade, garden turf, alarm system, lightings and other fittings. The earlier you get a plot off plan the more things you can choose to your taste. Otherwise during the building phases, as they are building they would have chosen the fitting options therefore the less you can choose.

• NEWLY BUILT - this is where the house/flat is already built; you won't have much options to choose like off plan, because they have already chosen and fitted them. But the house is ready to move into straight away. Often there will be several newly built property on the development site and when you go into them to view, they will have different fittings to attract different buyer's taste.

Advantages of new homes

• Everything brand new
• Modern look and fittings internally and externally
• Neutral colours paint (usually magnolia walls and white ceiling)
• Choose you own fittings and can easily design how you want your home to look and feel, as you buy furniture and fittings

Disadvantages of new homes

• Premium prices, usually for similar type of older houses, it would be much cheaper
• You need to put everything into the house, or upgrade the options provided by the developer. You will need to decorate/furnish the whole house (unless you buy the show house), as with new built homes there will be no curtain rails, no curtains and any furnishing. Sometimes people don't realise that, when you go into the show room the house/flat will be furnished extremely nicely and have top spec fittings. That's not what you going to get, unless you pay for it.
• Snagging, often in my experiences you will need to sort out a number of problems after you have moved in. Eg plumbing problems where something is leaking, little cracks is showing up (due to shrinkage), and sometimes certain doors/window don't seem to open or close nicely. But normally the developer will come to fix them quite quickly if they provide good service.

Buying cheaper new homes

With new homes you can still negotiate and generally there are different times where it is cheaper, these are:

• Off plan - as they want to sell early knowing that they will have buyers
• Properties that are built, but not selling for a while
• The developer's financial year end
• Towards end of developing the whole site, where there's only a few properties left and the developer wants to move to another development

Hope these information will help others when considering buying a new home. Please leave me some comments if you found it helpful.