When you buy a new build home, you expect it to be finished. You expect to walk in, set down your keys, and live in a property that has been built carefully, checked thoroughly, and handed over in the condition that the brochure promised. It is a reasonable expectation. It is also, far too often, not what happens.
Over the years we have carried out thousands of snagging inspections on new build homes across the UK, and we have looked closely at what our reports actually reveal. Two pieces of research drawing on this kind of survey data, one examining new homes in 2005 and another examining homes inspected in 2014 and 2015, reached a conclusion that should give every new build buyer pause. The average new build property contained around 141 defects. Not one or two. Not a dozen. On average, well over a hundred separate items needing attention, in a home that had already been signed off as complete.
What is most telling is not the number itself, striking as it is, but the fact that it barely moved across a decade of supposed progress in the industry. This article walks through what that data shows, why these defects keep happening, and what it means for you if you are about to buy a new home.
141 defects, then and now
The first study analysed 32 detached three to five bedroom homes built by 13 established UK housebuilders, all of them sizeable companies constructing between 900 and 16,000 homes a year. Across those 32 properties, inspectors logged a total of 4,523 defects, categorised into 100 different defect descriptions. That works out at a mean of 141 defects per property.
The second study, conducted roughly a decade later, looked at 55 defect reports from homes ranging from one bedroom apartments to five bedroom houses, built by 37 different private UK housebuilding companies. The total defect count this time was 7,758, across all 55 properties. The average per property? 141.05.
Two separate investigations, different samples, different property types, different builders, roughly ten years apart, and an almost identical result. When two independent sets of data land on the same number like that, it stops looking like coincidence and starts looking like the settled normal state of the industry. The basic standard of finish on a new UK home had not meaningfully improved across the period these studies covered.
If you are buying new because you assume “new” means “flawless”, this is the single most important thing to understand. The evidence simply does not support that assumption.
What kind of defects are we talking about?
It would be comforting to imagine that 141 defects mostly means trivial things, a smudge here, a missing screw there. The reality is more mixed, and more serious, than that.
In the first study, 78% of all defects related to the aesthetic finish of the home, things like rough or missing paintwork, marked or stained walls and ceilings, plaster cracks, poor jointing and untidy presentation. These are the defects that make a brand new home feel anything but brand new. But the remaining defects are where the concern deepens. Around 18% of faults were judged to carry significant implications for the building’s integrity, both present and future, and a further 4% were classed as direct health and safety risks. Within that 18%, around half related to moisture penetration, with the rest covering airtightness, drainage, ventilation and structural risk. These are not cosmetic. A home that lets in moisture, drains rainwater poorly or has compromised airtightness is a home storing up expensive problems for its owner.
Perhaps the most damning detail: in that study, 25 of the 32 homes surveyed contained at least one breach of statutory Building Regulations. Put differently, the analysis found roughly an 80% likelihood that any given property would contain a defect contravening the regulations, on top of the 18% risk to the building’s functional integrity and the 4% risk to occupant health and safety. These are homes that had, in theory, already passed inspection.
The later study broke its 7,758 defects down by trade, and the pattern is just as revealing. Internal decoration was consistently the worst category, accounting for 32% of all defects, an average of around 45 separate decorating snags per home. “Other internal” items such as cleaning, mastic sealing and general finishing made up 24%, and carpentry and joinery a further 20%. Strikingly, 87% of all defects were internal and only 13% external.
That external figure deserves a word of caution rather than reassurance. A new home’s warranty typically runs for ten years, but it splits in two: the builder is responsible for almost everything in the first two years, while years three to ten cover mainly structural elements such as the roof, superstructure and foundations. The reason so few external defects show up at the point of handover is largely that the external and structural problems have not surfaced yet. They are latent, waiting to appear one, two or three years down the line. Warranty claims data bears this out, with the roof alone accounting for a very large share of claims in the later years of cover. The low external figure at handover is not a sign of quality. It is a sign that some problems simply have not had time to reveal themselves.
Booking a snagging inspection before you complete is the single most effective way to get these defects documented and onto the builder’s repair list while the responsibility for fixing them is unambiguously theirs. If you would like to arrange one, our team can help.
Why does this keep happening?
If the defects are this numerous and this consistent, the obvious question is why. The research, supported by an interview with our managing director, points to several reinforcing causes rather than a single villain.
Quality comes second to completion. The blunt summary from inside the industry is that quality takes second place to profit, and that the prevailing attitude to defects is to sort them out after legal completion. Nothing is allowed to delay completion. That mindset is reinforced by sales contracts weighted heavily in the builder’s favour, which we will come to shortly.
The half year rush is real and measurable. One of the most arresting findings in the later study was a sharp seasonal spike in defects. June produced 1,125 snags and July 1,325, against a monthly average of around 646. Homes completed in those months were markedly worse. The explanation is the builder’s half year end, when regional teams must report completion numbers to head office. Hit the target and bonuses follow; miss it and bonuses, and sometimes jobs, are lost. The result, year after year, is that homes get rushed to completion at these peak times, with predictable consequences for quality and for the customer service that follows.
The trades are set up to fail. Decorators, the trade responsible for the single largest category of defects, are often left to “perform miracles”, covering up the poor work of the plasterers and carpenters who came before them, frequently with too little time to do the job properly. Mastic sealing has become a trade in its own right, yet is often carried out by inexperienced hands. Layer on top of this the fact that a large majority of the housebuilding labour force is subcontracted, and you have an industry where ensuring consistent skill and quality on any given site is genuinely difficult, and where accountability for who created which defect is often lost entirely.
Defect management is fragmented. Research cited in the earlier study found that a majority of construction organisations had no reliable way of tracking how many snags existed, which contractor or trade was responsible, or when a defect should be rectified by, with many still relying on paper records. If a business cannot see its own defects clearly, it cannot systematically reduce them.
The same faults have persisted for decades. When the first results were set against a 1971 survey of new home defects, the top recurring items, rough internal paintwork, incomplete external paint, missing mastic pointing to windows, poor door fitting, were remarkably similar across 35 years. These are not complex engineering challenges. They are basic matters of care and finish. The persistence of such simple faults across decades points not to difficulty but to a lack of diligence and a lack of pressure to improve.
“But surely it’s been checked already?”
This is the part many buyers find hardest to accept. An independent snagging survey is, at minimum, the third inspection a new home should have received. The site manager inspects it. The warranty provider inspects it, primarily for insurance and structural purposes. Building Control inspects it. Every property should pass through at least these checks before you ever get the keys.
And yet the defects are still there, in their hundreds across a sample, because these inspections are largely a form of self inspection by the industry, on the industry, for the industry. The most widely used warranty provider covers around 80% of the new build market and sets the standards that most builders sign up to. But that body is funded by the builders and developers themselves, not by you, the buyer. That funding model places it in an awkward position, simultaneously acting as standards setter, consumer protector and insurer whose commercial interest lies in keeping claim costs down. Calls over many years, including in Parliament, to address the imbalance between buyer and seller in the new homes market have repeatedly been met with preferences for voluntary, internal industry responses rather than firm external reform.
There is a revealing wrinkle in the data here. In the later study, homes covered by the largest warranty provider actually showed the highest average number of defects, around 148 per property, compared with roughly 125 and 111 for two smaller providers. At first glance that seems backwards. The explanation is that the inspection standards applied are higher for the larger provider, so more items are correctly flagged. In other words, a “better” standard does not mean fewer defects are being built; it means more of the existing defects are being caught. The defects are there regardless. The only variable is how thoroughly someone is looking.
That is the heart of the matter, and the answer to the question the second study set out to ask, namely whether self inspection is enough to ensure high quality standards. The conclusion was an unambiguous no. The checks the industry runs on itself are demonstrably not catching what they should, and the only reliable way to know the true condition of your specific home is to have someone independent, working solely for you, look at it properly.
What this means for you as a buyer
None of this is an argument against buying a new build home. New homes offer real advantages, and our purpose is not to frighten you out of one. It is to make sure you go in with clear eyes rather than a brochure’s worth of optimism.
A few things follow directly from the evidence:
Expect defects, plan for them, and do not be embarrassed to insist they are fixed. With an average of 141 per home, finding a long list is normal, not a sign that you have been unlucky or that you are being fussy. As one perspective in the research put it, when you buy a new television you expect it to work out of the box and would return it the same day if the remote were missing, so it is reasonable to hold the largest purchase of your life to a similar standard.
Get the home documented before you complete, if you possibly can. The earlier defects are identified and recorded, the stronger your position. Once you have completed and moved in, it becomes harder to prove a defect was pre existing rather than caused by you. Buyers typically have up to two years from completion to report defects under warranty, but the cleanest moment to capture them is right at the start.
Use an inspector who works only for you. The value of an independent inspection lies precisely in the fact that there is no conflict of interest, no relationship with the developer to protect, and no commercial reason to downplay what is found. The job is to represent you, document every issue against the relevant standards, and give you a clear, evidenced report you can put in front of the builder.
The cost of doing this is modest set against the purchase. An independent snagging inspection is a very small line item next to the many other costs of buying a home, and a single overlooked moisture or drainage defect can cost far more than the inspection if it is left to develop. One recommendation to emerge from the research was that a snagging inspection should become a standard part of the conveyancing process, sitting alongside the local authority, drainage and land registry searches a solicitor already arranges, on the simple logic that if builders knew every home would be independently checked, standards would rise. Until that day comes, arranging your own inspection is the most direct way to protect yourself.
If you are approaching completion on a new build, or have recently moved in, this is exactly the point at which a professional snagging inspection earns its keep. Our inspectors work only for home buyers, never for developers, and produce a detailed report within two working days. Get in touch to book your inspection and find out the true condition of your new home.
People build houses, and people make mistakes, so some defects in any new home are inevitable. Perfection is not the standard anyone reasonable is asking for. The standard is simply that the minimum should be met, that basic care should be taken, and that the figure should improve year on year as skills and technology advance.
The uncomfortable lesson from the data is that, left to inspect itself, the industry has shown little sign of delivering that improvement on its own. Two studies a decade apart found the same 141 defects. The same basic faults recurred across more than thirty years. The clearest signal a builder receives that quality matters is the knowledge that someone is checking, independently and on the buyer’s side.
That someone can be us. If you are buying a new build home, an independent snagging inspection turns 141 invisible problems into a documented list the builder is obliged to address, and turns your assumption that the home is finished into the certainty that it actually is.