Customer satisfaction and snagging in the UK private house building sector

The idea of assessing new home customer satisfaction, under a systematic approach, began in 2000 and the performance of the private house building sector of the UK construction industry has been measured in recent years using seven national customer satisfaction surveys. Recently, the house building sector has begun to emerge from its lowest levels of activity for many years. During this period of low output, the levels of customer satisfaction reported in surveys conducted by the Housing Forum and the House Builders Federation have improved only slightly to 77% (2009) compared to 76% in the previous two years when activity was much higher. During the same period snags reported by customer increased from 94% in 2007 to 95% in 2009 on a 20% smaller sample. Data collected in these surveys demonstrates that only three quarters of customer are happy with their new home and the trend regarding defects being reported by customers appears to be increasing. The authors have also analysed a dataset of 199,000 snagging items the results of which demonstrate the problem of snagging within private house building not only in relation to the Paretto 80/20 concept but also the relationship that snagging plays in terms of technical and functional quality.