When they moved from Stevenage to Gainsborough in Lincolnshire last year, Greg and Juli Dear decided to buy in a new development. Their previous three homes had been new-build, and the four-bed show house they saw looked ideal. But, having paid £146,950, the house into which the couple were finally invited to move last June was a terrible disappointment.

“Sockets were missing and there were wires hanging out of the wall; there was no dishwasher, there was a huge puddle on the living room floor and for some reason the bannister had been removed,” says Juli, 39, an office manager. “Even the sale negotiator told us when she handed over the keys that it could never have been ready in time.”

The customer relations manager from developer Persimmon Homes visited the site, but the Dears say they found him unhelpful. “We didn’t even get much from the managing director when we wrote to him,” claims Juli.

Finally, the Dears contacted Inspector Home, a professional snagging company. It made a list of the faults in the Dears’ new home and is lobbying to get them corrected. Having paid £500 for this service, out of a total of 20 highlighted items two now remain unresolved — a missing section of garden fence and a damaged shower-cabinet door.

“While we accept there have been some snagging issues at Mr and Mrs Dear’s property, these have been relatively minor and on the whole dealt with very quickly,” says Persimmon Homes South Yorkshire. “We remain committed to resolving the situation as soon as possible.

“We take all issues of build quality seriously and have our own internal procedures. We are always willing to look at reports produced by external snagging companies; however, they can sometimes give purchasers a false picture of their new home by classing items well within building tolerances as problems.”

But the growing number of professional snagging companies indicates an increasing determination by buyers not to accept imperfections, even if developers see them as small.

Stephen Nancarrow, founder of Inspector Home, says: “Developers started off by being very wary but in the last year or so they seem to have accepted us.”

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Catriona Bright of New Build Inspections came into the business from teaching English as a foreign language after her own experience of buying a new home that had a large number of faults.

“Disputes with developers are relatively rare now, but employing a snagging service is becoming part of the buying process, like getting a mortgage,” Bright says.

Developers will inevitably contest some issues that snagging companies highlight, but any of the latter that make claims about generous compensation should be treated with scepticism. “We’re really just doing what the builder should have done in the first place,” says Vanessa Ambler of Inspector Home. Properties the firm handles have an average of between 75 and 100 defects, which would cost an owner about £2,500 to fix themselves.

Jeremy Leaf, a spokesman for the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS), says fewer than 20% of buyers commission full structural surveys for their properties, relying instead on mortgage surveys. The number for buyers of new homes is even lower.

“Buyers are already often complacent when they’re buying a new home,” Leaf says. “They should be every bit as vigilant as if it were an old property. They usually place undue reliance on the National House-Building Council (NHBC) guarantee, but they must have their own assessment of what should be working when they buy.”

He points out that this warranty guarantees the developer, not the buyer, so the buyer will have to go through the developer to get repairs carried out.

The NHBC has its own resolution service, which involves an NHBC claims investigator assessing the faults in a property. If the work hasn’t met the council’s standards, it will instruct the builder to carry out repairs within a specified time, depending on the severity of the flaws. If the builder refuses, the NHBC will carry out the work itself.

“People have very high expectations, which are not always met,” says Helena Pennycook of Zurich Insurance, which provides the other main warranty cover used by builders in the new-homes market. “Our warranty is against serious damage such as damp penetration or major cracks due to the ground not being properly prepared — it’s not a policy against snagging issues.”

The most common problems snagging companies deal with include messy plastering, slapdash paintwork and shoddy carpentry. In other cases, properties might not be completely waterproof.

“The pressure is on for all developers and their tradespeople to move on quickly to the next project — especially if financial results are imminent — so if the plasterer has done a bad job the painter won’t complain, he’ll just slap the paint on top,” says Ambler.

Peter Appleby, of Survey Homes 2000, says: “We work to the NHBC tolerance. The problem is that sometimes these homes are signed off by the developer before they’ve been properly checked.”

Appleby is now employed by developers to inspect properties for them after they have been approved by the developer’s own quality-assurance team. As he explains: “We’re just checking the checkers.”

Inspector Home, 0845 408 4979, www.inspectorhome.co.uk; New Build Inspections, 0845 226 6486, www.newbuildinspections.com; Survey Homes 2000, 0117 971 6868, www.surveyhomes2000.co.uk

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