cant seem to find any details about display homes in the melbourne area for clarendon - nothing on their website about it.

does anyone know if they have a presence in the melbourne area?

Yes they do, there were some opposite us but they have just closed.

I think there may be some in Tarneit but not sure.

That is very interesting about Plantation. Will keep that in mind.

We are building just now with coral homes and so far they have been great - no nasty suprises with price - once you have signed your contract its fixed price - the only things that can add to your price are variations to contract you make durther down the line at your colour selection ie we have picked a granite bench for kitchen and added an upgraded garage door - but even with these changes its only adding on a couple of hundred dollars which we will just pay out of our pocket - it was our choice to do that - if you were super organised then you would add all these things early on in the contract and that way they would be mortgaged.

I have found the whole process very slow from when we first picked our house. Its labourious and time consuming but will hopefully be worth it for the finished product on the block of land we fell in love with.

Retaining walls do add extra costs but our sales man at Coral was very accurate and upfront with those additional costs right from the beginning - that obviously depends on the land you have picked - our land sloped from front to back by 2m gradient - dosen't look much but unless you consider building a split level home you will need retaining walls - 7k sounds about right but remember if the retaining wall is higher than 2m at any point you will need council approval and that = extra costs - its cost us about $600 to put our walls through council simply because one tiny bit of the retaining wall was higher than 2m - the majority of the wall s only 0.9-1.5 m high. Thats = more delays for time - we still haven't got a build start date as we are waiting on retaining wall approval though we have got approval for our main house build - we should have a build start date sometime next week.

HTH

Hi
We built with Coral first time around and were generally very happy. The sales girls said from teh start they Coral are slow at the paperwork stage but quick to build and this was spot on. Paper work took around 5 months and the build around 4.

This time we are trying Dixon Homes- so far so good. They have well over a hundred plans to choose from if you look on the net and they have been around for years - two things which were crucial to us. We are building a 2 storey this time and Dixon had loads of plans to choose from. We are owner supplying a lot of things (I work in plumbing industry) and would only have chosen a builder who I could have done this with as I want decent fittings.

Good luck whoever you choose.

Sunshine Sarah

i hope youve got it in the contract that they will fit what you supply. ive seen people supply stuff and the builder refuse to install incase they damage it. it may well be in the contract that you will supply items but it must also state that they will fit the supplied items. im sure you will be ok but look into it. we are doing a lot of work for dixon homes in cairns and ive seen it happen here. owners getting slugged extra to install a cooktop or oven theyve supplied themselves. its an absolute rort because we quote for the full job regardless who supplies the gear. the builder will use it as an opportunity to claw in some extra cash. i would not trust any builder and ive found the big ones are the worst.