Barratt Homes Northampton

Shocking builders! Tradesman have no pride in their work! Customer services and communication is not acceptable would never buy a house from them again!

Once purchased they don't help at all. Only interested in sales. Be wary.

There are other builders available

Buyers beware
Absolute horrendous Company to deal with.

We visited Willow Grove in August and reserved a house this was to be our forever home and was dealt with by Francesco.

I informed my solicitor of our intended purchase and explained our reservation about the 28 day exchange. My solicitor explained that Barratt was the worst ones at insisting the 28 day exchange. They described them as bordering aggressive.

We experienced delays in the local searches for both the new house and the one we were selling this was due to a back log at Bedford council.

We had chosen some extras for our home, our sales advisor miss quoted for upgrading carpets. When we complained we received a perfetic excuse and really poor customer service. We decided not to spend any more money with this builder and chose to cancel all the upgrades apart from an electric socket.

A few weeks later we visited a Barratt show house in Cambridge, we liked the upgraded carpets. We called Francesco at willow Grove to request to change the carpets to upgraded ones at our cost, Francesco stated this could not be done without even making an enquiry.

I asked to speak to his supervisor as to be told they had been ordered was total rubbish the house had only just been plastered.

After two weeks of not hearing anything I chased willow Grove and eventually the sales manager Amy Rowlands called me. She was very aggressive and argumentative she did not care that her staff had been incompetent and basically offered to refund our deposit because we were not happy with the chosen carpets.

The point she kept making was choices could not be changed (we were not made aware of this) and that it would hold up the build. I question how altering the carpets could hold up the build as they were installed when the build was complete. Amy did not like this and then changed her reason that if they changed it for us then they would have to change for Mr and Mrs Smith up the road.

Amy Rowlands followed up our conversation with an email and issued a deadline to be in October then retracted stating September exchange which was for four days later.

This was done in a vindictive and nasty way and I was made to feel on the phone call she did not want our money.

Turns out there is a problem in our chain beyond our control and so Barratts are pulling the sale and re-marketing the house! we are now out of pocket, we lose the house because they won't give our external solicitors another 2 weeks to complete a legal transaction!!!!! It is out of our hands but they don't care.

An absolute hideous company as these reviews show , perhaps we have had a lucky escape and we believe things happen for a reason and thankful we did not spend the 12 thousand on extras.

I am writing this review to warn others to think VERY CAREFULLY before getting into the buying process with Barratt based on my recent experience with them.

We agreed to purchase a plot from them with an incentive they would pay our stamp duty of £10,800. On the reservation form they gave us 28 to complete to get this incentive. The first thing we discovered is that it is quite hard to find a solicitor that is able to work to these incredibly short timescales, but we did find one that specialised in new builds so they were aware of the immense pressure developers put on everyone to complete. Even still Barratt rang our solicitor and estate agent 3 TIMES PER DAY for the duration of this process, causing our solicitor to rack up a lot of time on our case and leave them quite frustrated.

My buyers were first time buyers and had used a lifetime ISA to save for their deposit which has a release time of about 2 weeks. After reading the contracts that Barratt had submitted to our solicitor, their standard contract actually says you ONLY NEED TO EXCHANGE by the deadline date to get incentives, not complete. When we discussed this on the phone they insisted that if we did not COMPLETE on the deadline date they would not pay our stamp duty – even though they had issued contacts to the contrary initially – so they changed the usual rules especially for us, all because it was their end of quarter and they WANTED THEIR MONEY RIGHT NOW (no doubt so some jumped-up Sales Director could get his bonus earlier). We unfortunately found this out too late in the process and had already incurred £1000’s in legal fees and mortgage survey fees. Still Barratt refused to budge and left us with one of the worst weeks of my life with many sleepless nights wondering if our sale was going to even happen – it’s not like everyone has a spare £11k hanging around in their pocket.

In the end there was a 1 DAY delay due to our buyer’s funds so we asked Barratt if we could exchange contracts on the deadline and complete the NEXT WORKING DAY. They said NO!!!! The very next day after the deadline they put our house back on the market and sold it someone else a couple of days later!! We had our house packed up in boxes, children in floods of tears and we were £1000’s out of pocket. They didn’t even give us time to try and apply for more on our mortgage to cover the deficit removing their impossibly timed ‘incentive’ removal left.

You are led to believe that buying a new build will be stress free and easy. Maybe it is with other developers but not with Barratt – they care nothing about their customers - the only thing that matters to them is their sales bonus’. They are nothing but unreasonable, ruthless bullies and caused not only me but our estate agent and solicitor endless stress with their constant harassment.

So unless you are ABSOLUTELY sure you are in no chain and have compete control over your completion date I would implore you not to enter into this process with Barratt unless you are prepared to throw £1000’s down the toilet and put yourself through weeks of stress

(Translated by Google) Good

(Original)
Goood

After missing a document when I bought my house which has caused a lot of stress, I can't thank Emma the sales office manager enough. She was quick to reply and chased everything very quickly for us. From having a bad experience she has turned it into a positive.