New Home Delivery Schedule

I know that no one really "knows" when their house will be delivered but I'm interested to know if there are any almost homeowners out there who have at least some idea.

We're moving to Southern Walk townhomes by Van Metre and although the contract says Mid-July, I recently found out from the sales team that houses farther along than ours aren't scheduled to be done until September (apparently Washington Gas is 4 weeks behind).

Ok so I asked CS of Van Metre if they could at least give me some idea if the information the sales team has is accurate and should I expect our house to be done 2-3 months behind the original estimate. They have no idea about the Washington Gas thing & just repeated the normal estimate (120 days past framing, 45-60 days past drywall..blah blah)

SO, sorry to make a long story longer but is anyone in this same boat? I'd love to hear other new or soon to be homeowners tell me what they know about their delivery schedule. I'll take any information I can get:-D

Thanks

 

We signed our contract in mid-January. They told us the same thing -- 120 days from ground-break. Well, they broke ground in mid-March and we have our closing date set for July 14. Perhaps we're one of the lucky ones.

 

Hello,

My wife and I signed a contract in mid December for a SF detached house in Overland Park. Construction began on February 7th, and we are scheduled for closing on June 24th.

I think that for the SF detached estimate of 120 days is fairly accurate as we were told VM lost about 2-3 weeks due to the snow.

Hope this helps,
Peter

 

We just moved into our new home in May 03, and we had our contract with Van Metre in Oct 2003, supposed to move in sometime at the end of Feb 2003, but it was kept delaying.

Don't count on their schedule otherwise it will cost you a lot of money for double/tripple moves and storage as in our case.

Good luck.

 

I agree that you should not count on a schedule, but VM has generally been good with their targets (from my experience and that of some neighbors). Obviously, weather will affect delivery, and the heavy snows in February caused a lot of delays! (Only the Farmer's Almanac predicted the President's Day Weekend storm so far in advance!)

 

FYI, the unofficial timeframe (as of our pre-drywall walkthru today) is Mid-Late August. So that's better than September. The person that had told me September was new and got their wires crossed.

 

I just had Pre-Dry Wall inspection today morning, the guy incharge of construction said 6-8 weeks from today which will fall into early September. I hope Thats accurate...

Sudha

 

I hate to rain on anyone's parade but as was mentioned earlier - give VM some room to slip becuase it's likely they will and moving twice/getting storage is not pleasant. After getting the 45-60 day estimate at our pre-drywall meeting, we sold our existing home. We allowed for an additional 3 weeks beyond the 60 day timeframe for the completion of our new home. We locked in our financing and gave a move out date - again, 3 weeks beyond VM's longest estimate of 60 days. It's now been 8 weeks and we have to be out of our house and our finance lock runs up in 3 weeks and VM has yet to schedule their internal quality walkthrough (which typically happens 2 weeks before closing).

Fingers are crossed but it's probably going to be close either way. Lesson learned - make sure you give VM time to slip or it will be massive headaches for you. We were even told at our design center appt. that they slip on 80% on the dates so not to schedule a back to back closing. Turns out it was excellent advice.

Good luck.

 

Well that's no big surprise unfortunately. However we locked on our loan and the clock is ticking so my fingers are crossed for us & for you! Let's all do a "house ready on time" dance

 

Word of advise! Visit your home to be as often as you can. Keep your eyes open for improper/insufficient insulation... Or you will have horrendous gas bills. Check out the nightmare that one of our fellow neighbors went thru. Go to Homeowners Corner, then look for Anyone else find missing insulation? I am not that homeowner. But I sure as you know what! Wish I has seen this coming. The same thing happened to my fiancee and I. Good luck with your new home. And a warm welcome to our neighborhood.

 

FYI and heads up - don't put too much weight in those 45-60 day estimates they give you at pre-drywall. Today is day 63 for us and it looks like we will be closing in 3-4 more weeks (80-90 days total). We are out thousands in additional moving, storage and finance costs and are crossing our fingers for a 10 day extension on our interest rate lock since rates are up 3/4 of a point since we locked but our lock won't be good in 3-4 weeks! Without that lock we stand to lose $50,000+. Oh yeah, as of 8/15, we have to move into a hotel and foot that bill too.

The worst part is that Van Metre doesn't give two s**ts all we get told is that this is the system and it's in place for customer satisfaction. Certainly not this customer's! Not sitting well with us since the delay was caused by their putting up insulation and drywall in our basement that had standing water on the floor....hmmm, think that might cause mold?!!? Big shock they had to rip it all out and start over, delaying our closing.

I hope you all have much, much better luck.

 

Now I remember why we said we'd never buy new construction again. At our old place in Sterling we made them allow us to move in our furniture the weekend after we were supposed to close (closing had been moved from Thursday to Monday). I wouldn't do that again as we didn't get the final cleaning. It was just a nightmare.

I'm still living in denial and hoping this'll be done ASAP. And of course interest rates have started to rise. They've been going down all year until it's time for us all to lock Murphy's law.

Good luck with the extension and Maybe</u> you can talk to someone about getting VM to foot some of your bill since it was their error. Doubt it but squeaky wheel gets the grease.

 

We actually had our house deliver early, which for us was tough because we had another house to sell. We found out first week of June that our house would be ready June 20th when all projections said July. Luckily we got VM to extend closing to the 30th and sold our house in a day.

But now we are starting to see that by delivering our house early, a very, very sloppy job was done on getting the house ready in the end. We are fighting to have a lot of the caulking, painting and chipped accessories fixed now due to their running around and trying to complete this house early.

 

Yes definitely be cautious with "early" delivery dates. When we signed our contract in May 2002, the anticipated closing timetable was late October 2002. We visited our home site weekly (Judy Gilmore of Van Metre was amazingly patient with us and escorted us through the house every week, even with hard hats) and everything stayed pretty much on schedule...

Then in late August, VM told us to expect closing a month early</u> because the weather was so cooperative. We were a little suspicious because we had regularly seen the conditition of the house, but assumed they knew how much was left to do and could get it done. When the time came for our final inspection (with our own inspector), four days before closing</u>, the house was not ready. We complained to VM and word of the mix-up reached Mr. Van Metre himself, who came out to Broadlands to investigate and reportedly knocked some heads around...

VM construction had apparently placed on home on the "push" schedule, meaning they intended to push the envelope and finish the house in time for their September '02 quota. When that became an impossibility (to any reasonable person), they never informed the VM central office, which proceeded as if the house was going to be ready. With less than one week before the scheduled closing, and us having given notice to our rental landlord in Arlingon, we demanded full accomodation...

Fortunately, our rental landlord had not yet re-rented or sold that property, so we could stay in our current home despite having packed most of our things. VM paid our final month's rent at the old location, because we had not planned for a rental payment that month and (if we had no place to stay), they admittedly would have had to put us up somewhere and pay for storage of our property. Luckily, our home inspector did not charge us for the visit during which he couldn't do his job.

Related to all of this, we had wanted to get some "Builder's Blinds" window treatments installed and rolled into our mortgage, but because of the (faulty) early closing date, the VM Design Center refused to let us do that in August '02. As it turned out, there was plenty of time to do that, but no one realized it because construction was using an unreasonable and impossible "push" date. By the time everything was sorted out, we again had too little time for the Builder's Blinds option.

Sorry for the long story, but it's something all new buyers should know!

 

I would be interested to hear what kind of things you found in your home that were rushed and how it was resolved in the end as we are just now starting to get resolution. The more we live in our house, the more things we find....

 

At the time we went in for our final inspection (the early one), the countertops were not fully installed, the deck was not finished, some of the lighting and bathroom fixtures were incorrect, etc.

Once we straightened out the situation and moved closing back a month (to where it was supposed to have been all along), everything looked pretty good. But by our 60-day walk through it was clear that some things were still rushed or overlooked at the end. For example, the countertops were not properly attached and additional caulking was needed to fix that, and the carpet was laid with small holes in sections of the underlying floorboard (from where workers had dropped heavy tools, etc). The carpet had to be pulled up in spots to repair the floor, and we continue to find more spots needing repair at the one-year walk through. We also recently realized that our microwave oven is lacking a direct outside vent as we paid for, and VM is now trying to schedule workers to install the proper vent.

I am just thankful that we had no "major" problems like the missing insulation that others have reported... we used our own home inspector from pre-drywall through closing, and we personally inspected the house's progress on a weekly basis. Even though we were as diligent as possible, we still missed some items.

 

Supposedly we get to close at the very end of this month. Yaay! Hope it goes through

 

Fingers are crossed for you guys on the late August date.

I've been afraid to mention it for fear of jinxing things, but I do have to give Van Metre some credit for something. Our close date was set for 3 days after our finance lock ran up and we had to be out of our old house. After a lot of panic and talks with VM management and a review of what little needed done in the new house as of last week, they agreed that there was no reason why we couldn't get in on the date we needed. Just 9 days away now and all looks good. It could have cost us as much as $70,000 over the life of our mortgage not to mention storage costs and huge headaches all for three days. VM stepped up to make sure we were happy.

We've been watching progress very closely all along and are comfortable that nothing is being rushed to cut off the 3 days (it was cut from the last 2 weeks where all they are doing is the punch list and walk throughs).

I'm the first to admit it got frustrating dealing with them at times and our house is still being delivered several weeks beyond the 120 day estimate, but they came through when it mattered the most.

 

Ok so I'm not saying it out loud but "whew"! Keep us posted..are you going into townhomes? I forgot

 

No, we are in the SF homes in Southern Walk. Maybe since they are more square footage they take longer, but VM should be able to adjust the 120 day estimate if needed. It's not like our place is 10,000 sq. feet finished or anything, how much longer should it really take?
Not complaining, just wondering out loud.

We have nothing to complain about right now!