About Barratt Homes

The development is mainly good. Everyone is pretty relaxed. Depending on what atmosphere you like, the back of the estate is very quiet, I live in the middle of the estate where you can enjoy a little bit of neighbourly drama, some noise and shouting – and this is genuine I don’t mind it from time to time. The development itself if well located, there’s lots of green space, a small lake where you may find swans, there’s the canal that you can take a nice stroll by at night and there’s a forest at the back too with more streams and wildlife.

We were recommended to move to Waterside Park by an estate agent. We have always lived locally but we have a disabled member of our family and needed a home with specific adaptions. We moved into our house when it was brand new and we spoke directly with the developer to ensure everything met our needs. The house has a lift installed and the kitchen units and sinks have been lowered, we asked before moving in for the kitchen units to be made slightly higher and this was arranged. Whilst the kitchen is ridiculously small with the lift there is not much else they could have done on the configuration. The garden is also really small but is big enough.

Kingsbrook wasn’t for us unfortunately. We chose the development because of the marketing stressing how wildlife friendly it was going to be. However, once we were there, although Barratts had done what they said they would do, that was the end of the story. There was nothing to engage people and involve them. The wildlife initiative was just a paper project with no reality.
We thought the build itself was poor and had a lot of snagging. It was very difficult to get anything done about problems, took many hours of chasing round and trying to contact people.
We didn’t like the actual layout of the estate. We didn’t like effectively having no front garden and that people, if they were so inclined, could come right up to our front window and look inside. The back garden was overlooked all round by a cluster of surrounding houses. It seems that nowadays many people want huge houses and don’t care about gardens. This is the exact opposite of our priorities.
We didn’t like the detachment from the local authority for services that are part of community charge on traditional residential property. The service charge felt out of our control and an unknown factor for the future.

As a first time buyer we were mesmorised by the design of the hosue but now we are in we would probably be a little more considerate of storage options along with the opportunity to extend. These are not great for the homes. We have a three bed semi-detached home. Garden was unfortunatly a complete write off when it rained so have had that done and drainage added which cost a fortune but hopefully adds to the value of the property. The front room design is awkward and there is only one way to have the furniture and tv really unless you paid to move the eletrics and ariel etc. Upstairs is reasonable size but would say master bedroom could be bigger and double room could be slightly smaller. These rooms are easy to dress and good that there is a gap for wardrobes. Overall smaller now we are in which I think is normal for new builds. Lots of little snagging issues which originally were sorted quickly but not takes time and a lot of effort on our part to try and get these sorted. Also we find that they will say yes to certain snags to our neighbours and for us would say no or vice versa, seems one rule for one and one for another. Overall I love my home and believe we would have almost certainly had a worse service from other new build companies from reviews. However I do believe there is still a way to go with the front sales team and over the phone handling of calls/emails. Finally, the bit that we found most annoying was the loft is unable to be boarded up so you cant use for storage which would sort out the issue of storage at least by 50%