Your customer journey… to nowhere
It is not customer care, it’s damage control, and you are the one they want to control
You are a claimant, not a customer
Housebuilders’ after-sales customer service offerings are sold to you as a convenient way for you to report defects to them and get things put right at no cost to you.
You might even be told that you MUST use their service on threat of getting nothing if you don’t.
Your new home warranty is designed to work the same way.
Both schemes require you to tell them informally about your concerns, let them investigate, let them decide, let them do the work (or not), whilst you remain sidelined from the decision making process.
These schemes may be free to use, but the hidden indirect cost to you may be HUGE.
The common feature of these schemes is this: if you don’t like what they are offering, they implicitly (and sometimes not so subtly) pose the question to you: WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT?
If all you do is use their schemes on their terms, the answer to that question is likely to be: NOTHING. You get what you are given, or you go without.
Their schemes are designed to ensure that they decide what you get, whether you like it or not, so they can profit from your loss.
They will never tell you what you should be doing in order to get what you are entitled to. BUT WE WILL. They want you to fail. We want you to succeed, and we have an exceptional track record of helping our clients do just that.
With our New Home Buyer Claims service, you get your own highly experienced professional team to help you get what you are entitled to, not what they want to get away with, affordably and cost-effectively.
Please get in touch today to find out how we can help you.
New Homes Ombudsman
Yet another scheme laid on by the industry, designed to keep you at a disadvantage and deny you fair redress.
Key features:
No entitlement to recover legal or surveying costs, a powerful deterrent against seeking professional advice without which you are unlikely to get full redress. If you pursued the same issues in court you would normally be entitled to recover your costs, freeing you to get professional advice and recover in full.
Absolute discretion to decide whether to accept your complaint. Evidence given by NHQB to Parliament suggests they reject around 90% of complaints received, no doubt a reflection of how difficult it can be for laypeople to work out how and when to pursue a ‘valid’ complaint.
Absolute discretion over how to deal with complaints they do accept, denying you procedural certainty contrary to the rules of natural justice. Pursuing the same issues in court would ensure procedural certainty, fairness and justice.
Limited to considering complaints about a developer’s breach of the New Homes Quality Code - but without legal advice, would you know what obligations were owed, how to prove breach, how to quantify your losses? The scheme rules give you ZERO guidance on this - setting you up to fail.
Compensation limited to £75,000 - being less than it would cost to bring the average* new build freehold house up to standard. No cap would apply if you pursued the same issues in court.
No requirement to apply the law, denying you certainty or fairness contrary to the rules of natural justice. No right to a hearing and no right of appeal, contrary to the rules of natural justice.
If you play by their rules, you are likely to lose by design and may never even know by how much.
Our New Home Buyer Claims service is how you overcome these industry-created obstacles to justice to ensure you to get what you are entitled to, not what they want to get away with.
* based on analysis of client matters handled by Wingrove Law between 2014-2026