Highwood Village,  RH12

Please tell us about the good and bad aspects of living in your local area:

Horsham is a good town. Evident that number of residents is increasing a lot with all the housing developments in the area. The car park at the station is pretty much full of commuters by 9am. Increasing amount of traffic on the development.

How has the building management responded to any problems or issues you have raised:

A long list of snagging issues were eventually put right, but did not expect to be dealing with that when paying a premium for the so called Berkeley standard. Building management were better than the sales team though.

Please share one thing (or more) which you wish you had known before you moved in:

Terrible soundproofing leaves you dealing with noise, unable to get to sleep whilst listening to all manner of noises from your neighbours including dialogue on their tv. Very high electricity bills need to be budgeted because it poor insulation and all electric installation.

Please tell us about the good and bad aspects of living in your local area:

Great outside area, nice riverside walk, plenty of mature trees, shrubs and hedges, nice squares. No local shops, but close to big Tesco.

How has the building management responded to any problems or issues you have raised:

Reasonably well, although once they got really busy the quality went downhill.

Please share one thing (or more) which you wish you had known before you moved in:

Apart from few Nimbys there is a great sense of community and generally nice people living here.

Please tell us about the good and bad aspects of living in your local area:

I have lived here for over a year now. It is a nice development, growing rapidly. The biggest issue is the parking. Extremely limited and residents are receiving parking tickets even for parking across their own drive. 6 visitor spaces for approximately 50 homes. This has not been thought out well at all.

Please share one thing (or more) which you wish you had known before you moved in:

Wish I knew about the parking. Signs went up after I moved in

Please share one thing (or more) which you would change about your development:

I Would have liked the garage to have a tap fitted.

Please tell us about the good and bad aspects of living in your local area:

Good transport links as near to A24. Bit of traffic noise due to location. Tesco is across the bridge but no on site shops

Please share one thing (or more) which you wish you had known before you moved in:

The thickness of floors and walls is not as good as you would have expected

Please share one thing (or more) which you would change about your development:

Reduce the cost of management charges as they are not good value for money

Please tell us about the good and bad aspects of living in your local area:

Horsham is a lovely area to live in. There’s several large supermarkets in close proximity to the town centre including Tesco, Sainsburys and Waitrose. The town centre has lots of boutique shops as well as some more well known high street shops. There’s a good selections of pubs around Horsham and a great selection of restaurants in the town centre. Horsham park is a good size and nice area to walk around, with a really lovely cafe called Kaya near the bandstand. Horsham has great transport links to Brighton and London, and is close enough to Gatwick airport that you can be there in about 20/25 minutes, but far enough away that you don’t hear any noise from it. The Highwood estate is a lovely place to live, and a nice area to walk around. It’s in a good location, just 20 minutes from Horsham town by foot. It’s a relatively quiet estate that doesn’t get impacted by antisocial behaviour. Getting out of the estate can be a hassle some times as the roundabout over the dual carriageway can get very busy and cause hold ups. Parking is also a bit of a pain on the estate if you have more than one car as visitor spaces are very limited. The roads are also quite narrow which can be difficult to navigate round if people are parked on the side of the road. Bin collections are okay however if you live in an apartment, the bin cupboards can get quite smelly during Christmas and other holiday times when collections are a bit more spread out.

Please share one thing (or more) which you wish you had known before you moved in:

We wish we’d known to ask about future plans for the site. When we moved in we didn’t know that a fire station was being built on the development. We also wish we’d done more research into Help to Buy and how this could make it difficult to sell our property later on. We’d advise anyone who can purchase a property without the help of scheme to do so. It’s worth the wait and will make it easier to sell your property on later.

Please share one thing (or more) which you would change about your development:

Adding a window to the bathroom. Not having a window in our bathroom has been a huge pain and a bit of an issue for us. New properties should be more thoughtfully designed to make this possible to avoid issues later on with condensation etc - something we didn’t know as first time buyers until we lived in the property.