Our build with New Choice Homes is now being held up while we wait for an engineering assessment following an independent roof-frame inspection.
The inspection report was provided to New Choice Homes on 4 September.
Our independent building inspector specifically requested an engineer’s comment on an aspect of the roof framing.
New Choice Homes initially advised that no action was required and relied on advice from the roof carpenter rather than obtaining the engineering verification requested.
After repeated follow-up, the matter has now been referred to New Choice Homes engineering team.
On 14 October, we were advised that, due to “current workloads,” New Choice Homes could not confirm how long the assessment would take and was only “hopeful” the engineering team would be able to attend to it before the end of the month.
New Choice Homes also confirmed that waiting for this response is impacting progress on site.
That raises a broader question.
Does New Choice Homes have sufficient engineering capacity to deal promptly with technical and structural issues arising across its builds?
More importantly, this raises an issue for the wider residential construction sector.
A homeowner can carefully select a builder, engage an independent inspector and identify an issue early.
But if the builder does not have timely access to the technical resources required to assess that issue, the homeowner can still be left waiting — while their construction program stalls.
Before signing a building contract, consumers are rarely given meaningful information about a builder’s technical capacity, engineering resources or escalation processes.
Yet those internal resources can directly affect build quality, defect resolution and construction timeframes.
Engineering capacity should not become the homeowner’s problem after the contract is signed.
This is another reason we believe stronger transparency and more effective consumer protection during residential construction deserve serious attention.