Sekisui House Australia

Warning do not buy or build with Sekisui House. My upstairs shower leaks into the downstairs dining room through the dining room ceiling and down lights. They repaired the problem once and it is starting again. I have been calling them for a year… Read more

and a half to negotiate these . They avoid calls and will not pass you onto a manager to deal with. There maintenance manager is evasive and also refuses to take calls or to organise the repairs. I would never buy or build a home or any property from this company again unless you want constant stress in your life. Buyer beware.

Horror story – Unfinished homes being sold. Poor quality and no follow-up. Pre and post settlement issues. Passive aggressive staff. 99 day report still not completed 1 year on. Been advised that the smart switches have a known issue. Poor landscaping Fridge doesn't work and apparently Harvey Norman doesn't reply to SH Your bills remain unpaid despite… Read more

money being allocated at settlement.

Staff are not allowed to provide the contact details for management.

Maintenance team doesn't return calls or emails

Time for a lawyer

Property Manager Altura West Village – Simon the Property Manager at Altura has helped me tremendously while settling into my new apartment, couldn’t recommend him enough. Thank you for your professionalism and timely reaponses. Customer service is 10/10. Show details

Buyer be warned – SHA are absolutely hideous to deal with. I bought an apartment in their "Exclusive and never-before-seen Village Precinct" in West End, Brisbane. The quality in this apartment is absolutely appalling when you factor in the price we paid and doesn't even come close to the marketing dream they sold us. I have spoken with many residents of West… Read more

Village, in established and new buildings, and there is a consistent level of disappointment and disillusionment with the broken promises from SHA and the consistently poor quality workmanship of Hutchinson Builders. For anyone looking to purchase or invest in West Village. Stalk the front of Arcadia North and talk to the current residents before you put any money down. It will provide a much more realistic view of what you may be signing up for. Most importantly, don't believe the marketing budgets they stipulate in the disclosure documents either. They artificially lowered our budget by making a "once-off" contribution to the admin fund, meaning in the first year we saw a 30% increase in our Body Corporate levies. And I am sure they intend to do that again with future buildings like Altura.

Deplorable – Deplorable customer service from the beginning. Poor finishing you can see nail holes. Paint, one coat is enough. Cracked bathroom tiles. Shower leaked. NOW the roof has been leaking unknown to us. Sorry cant help you...Receptionist clearly had heard from people like me before. Almost scripted responce. Compare them to a clearance supermarket...GO ELSE WHERE...Pay a bit extra for quality...  Show details

Do not build with this company.......! – From start to finish and beyond I can honestly say this was an absolutely terrible build. (Built 2011) poor communication all round. Shoddy workmanship in EVERY trade. Worst paint job I have ever seen. Bathroom tile area leaked into a cupboard causing mould and damage - still not rectified uneven tiling in on- suite shower still leaking into… Read more

the wall....!

Have recently discovered a poor roof tiling/flashing area that has been leaking into the roof cavity for the past 7 years. We now have mould in our bedroom and bulging skirting boards. Will it be fixed by sekisui house ? absolutely not

Thanks for a really disappointing finished product an no help what so ever.

All that is left for us to do is warn other prospective customers to GO ELSEWHERE......

REALLY.

Dishonest, unreliable, terrible in any sense - Stay away please!!! – I just want to say at the beginning - please stay away from this company!!! So many other builders. We settled on our land one year ago. At the time we liked Sekisui Luzia the most, so we decided to get a bit serious about it and not waste time. A sales representative came to our unit for a meeting. He promised to be in at 7pm, came at… Read more

10pm!!! You should see the offer on a scrap paper with the teleshop sales pitch: "you won't pay 400k! You won't even pay 300k! If you sign up tonight you will only pay this much." Anyhow all he wanted is the credit card number for the tender. I said we weren't ready and wanted him to answer some questions on the options/build/process. As it was late at the time, I sent him an email with questions. 8 weeks later still no answers and lots of excuses (!!!!), I lost patience with him and went to their sales office at Home World Kellyville to ask for another sales rep. Got assigned another one. She was much better in communication, but had terrible requirements gathering habits (or no habits at all). Also, she didn't seem to had any freedom and whatever we asked about or asked for, she needed to check with someone from the office. We still signed up for the tender. The tender was one week late but at that stage a week means little. The tender had four shocks in there: 1. The price that was 50k more than expected, 2. House position, which was placed at 9.4m from the road, 3. the position of the water tank that was sitting right in the middle of our backyard and the last one 4. The plans had half a dozen pages and each page had at least 10 errors on it.

1. Price was not that important at that stage, as we were ready to compromise on options.

2. The setback by the council is 5,5 meters to the garage (4,5 m to the porch). I made a scale model of the house and placed it easily on the contour plan at around 6m from the road. Sekisui claimed that 9,4 meters was the right position and that all the other houses in the street have fudged the papers!!! They wanted to charge me for variation to put it at 6m from the road.

3. Before the tender I was told that the water tank could sit on the side of the house as they offered a slim tank that was 780mm wide. In the released tender the water tank was 870mm wide and would not fit at the side.

4. The errors on the plans were unbelievable. The downpipes were sitting right in the middle of our alfresco, the rooms which we asked to be the same, turned to be one 22sqm and the other 15sqm. Windows were added to the design with no question asked. There was a wall we asked to be removed, and it was still there and in the next revision the wall was removed but the power point for the wall was still on plans.

We still went on even though it was clear that this is not a good company. I learned how to use AutoCad and ScatchUP, only because their requirements management process was terrible, and I was sure there will be misses in the process. With AutoCad I did my own drawings in scale and each time they'd release something to us, I'd print our plans on the tracing paper and put it on top of their plans to find even more mistakes.

I asked for a longer meeting with the sales rep to finalise all the details before signing the contract. We agreed on everything with her. We even managed to put the water tank on the side and for the position they finally admitted to having made a mistake. By the time, she had my own architectural drawings of their own house, she had the requirements file in excel that I maintained for her. The meeting was to ensure she understood it all. She did. She then submitted the files to the office and the following day she hit me with extra drafting bill. I was offended by that as I did all the work for them and just decided not to go ahead with Sekisui. I stopped all communication and immediately signed a tender with another builder. 5 weeks later I received a call from a Sekisui manager who apparently was not aware of all this and promised to rectify the issues. So he promised to organise a meeting and agree on the future steps. That meeting never happened, and this was in July 2015!!!

I can only imagine what would the build be like if the much more simple process was that hard.

We have since found another builder and we are quite happy with the communication and the progress.

The bottom line for us is 6 months lost and the sunk cost of around 12000 AUD!!!

They closed operations in Victoria and SA. Their explanation was that they are focusing on NSW and QLD markets as Victoria and SA were not that active at the time. The truth is that they have no clue how to do their job, they are not honest and they'll screw you up. The turnaround of staff is huge and none of the people I dealt with are still with them.

STAY AWAY!!!

Hopeless crap builders – We are just starting our build now they the roof trusses are half up today after we told them about a piece of the frame work being around the wrong way. We now also have plumbing in the 2 bedroom floor as measurements were wrong and slab has to be amended. Been through 4 salesman, 3 colour consultants, and 4 customer service people today we… Read more

inspected the house and noticed the front windows weren't the ones we wanted as we told numerous times to sales people we wanted all sliding Windows now we have 2 wind out ones at the front the site supervisor said they are wind out on the plan but you put your trust in these people to get it right the numbers for the Windows mean nothing to us as we have no idea but a better explanation and pictures would have been good , thinking of getting them to stop already as we are so disappointed with them. They sux at the building game and so Unreliable very scary for the rest of the build.

The builder from hell – Every stage of the process was absolutely terrible. There was 3 different site managers during the build with different contractors finishing off jobs started by other contractors and unfinished as it turned out the builder hadn't been paying the contractors. Our 2nd of 3 site managers tried on several occasions to convince us if we paid the final… Read more

stage they would finish the house soon after even tho the house was obviously unfinished. The unfinished house then sat idle for several months until another site manager taken over. We would often contact Sekisui House to be told there was no one we could talk to and no one ever called back. The process took more than a year before the house was finished. The final product is of extremely poor quality. Since moving in we have had many problems, our latest drama being failed waterproofing in the ensuite shower which has rotted and damaged various parts of our floor coverings. The builder has redone the waterproofing but has left all the walls with the plaster cut out, holes in the floor and water damaged/ rotted floor coverings. We were told by a flooring contractor that flooring couldn’t be matched since it is not manufactured anymore and it will cost us around $10,000 to replace all our bamboo flooring throughout the house to match. We were told by one of the contractors that this builder is winding up in victoria and Burbank will complete some of their work. They are now avoiding any responsibility and I have been told by consumer affairs that a lengthy, drawn out process will be required to have the problem addressed with no results guaranteed. The 7 year builders warranty insurance only applies if the builder is bankrupt or dead so the warranty is of no use. Words cannot describe how disappointing this company has been, I wouldn’t wish it upon my worst enemies to build with this company.

Dishonest and Extremely Unreliable – A year of our lives was wasted dealing with Sekisui House Australia (Victoria) and their wholesale package provider iWealth Solutions. I would never recommend anyone to these companies nor would I recommend doing business with them voluntarily. We encountered a long list of issues at the hands of these companies, while trying to organise… Read more

construction of a new home. We tried countless times to address and resolve issues with Sekisui House through the Victorian State Sales Manager [name removed] which ultimately forced us to engage legal action to end the contract with Sekisui House Australia. Sekisui House responded in agreeance to end contract if we paid them a few thousand dollars in fees. We refused their demand and did some digging of our own in relation to the company, which revealed as of November 18th 2014, shortly prior to Sekisui House requesting a monetary exit fee from us to end contract, they were in fact in MAJOR BREACH of the H.I.A. Domestic Building Contract as they had a SUSPENDED BUILDING LICENCE therefore in no way could perform any legal construction. They were suspended at the time they requested us to pay exit fees to them and never once divulged this critically important information to us We immediately served a Notice to End Contract for the major breach and Sekisui House Australia immediately accepted to end contract with no further mention of fees. We found this company to be dishonest, untrustworthy and unreliable! We strongly recommend not doing business with them as it will cost you a lot of time, money and immense personal stress. We were lucky to get out before construction could commence and we count ourselves extremely fortunate as we were recently informed that Sekisui House VIC have gone belly up in Victoria and aren't remaining in the state.

Would definitely recommend to anyone looking to build – Wow! The whole process of building a home with Sekisui has been wow! If you want the wow factor in the service you receive, this is the place to be. From day 1 Sekisui really did raise the bar amongst the other 'builders' in the market. Most of them have a cheap display of theatrics to get you to sign the dotted line, having very quickly seen… Read more

this early on in the building process our decision to build with Sekisui has been one of great relief and happiness.

Now that you are engrossed in this review I will tell you exactly why I speak so highly of this organization.

Firstly, it’s the little things, every builder will give you a house with walls, a roof, and all the finishing you could ever imagine, but Sekisui focused on the little things, such as making sure our decisions early on would not impact things like council approval, 6 star energy ratings, encumbrances, etc. They were always one step a head in making sure we did not suffer from any unnecessary delays. [name removed], the consultant we dealt with was proactive in making sure the whole process would be seamless.

Building a home is a brutal assault on your emotions, especially for first home builders/owners, not to mention your pocket. [name removed] and the rest of the team at Sekisui were really good at building a relationship. They were genuine, supportive and really did understand us. [name removed] is a prime example of this, it was like he was building a home for himself, he cared about how we were feeling and made sure that kept every promise he had made. If [name removed] says he will email you by 5pm, then you can bank on getting an email before 5pm; this was the best part of dealing with Sekisui. Its trust and professionalism like this that makes this organization great.

The actual building process was very quick. It’s was pleasure to walk into a construction site to find it neat, tidy and on schedule. This is a sign of a group of professionals that respect their workplace and are building a home not just a house. We were kept up to date every step of the way but would like to have had more formal inspections on site. Our handover was relatively smooth, and all follow up work was promptly done.

If there were one thing I would ask Sekisui to change it would be to add a consultation phase before going into selections. It would be great to have a session on what is standard in the houses such as the height of light switches and all the other bits and pieces that the average customer would not really think of. My husband and myself had a pretty good idea of the style we wanted, but a consultation session about interior décor themes would have made the selection process a truly unique experience.

On the whole I will definitely build with Sekisui again. I have told all of my friends about them and will recommend them as one of the best builders in SA. They have truly helped us create a happy home trustworthy, reliable, great customer service some of the selections are limited