Getting Reservation Fee Refund From Taylor Wimpey

[Andy29]

I thought everyone might find our experience getting a deposit back from Taylor Wimpey interesting.
We paid a £1,000 Reservation Fee on a house in October when we lost the older house we'd set our heart on. Thankfully our desired home came back on the market and we dropped the Wimpey home like a hot brick!

Taylor Wimpey's site sales office told us originally we would only be entitled to 50% of our deposit back if we pulled out - but I managed to get £900 back after I found out about the Consumer Code for Home Builders on your main website and presented Requirement 2.6 to them.

"If a Reservation is cancelled, you should return the Reservation fee to the Home Buyer, less any reasonable administrative or other costs incurred in processing and holding the Reservation.
If the Home Buyer ends the contract because of substantial and significant change in design, or for unreasonable delay as defined in the Contract of Sale (see 3.3 above), then you must return the contract deposit and Reservation fees in full and without deductions.
You should repay Home Buyers as quickly as possible, preferably within 14 calendar days of the cancellation."

Taylor Wimpey implied that they had only refunded £900 because essentially, it had not gone to the solicitors stage (which they were calling us daily about!)....I do wonder however, whether they would have kept £500 had we not found the Consumer Code requirement though.

[New Home Expert]

I am pleased the information we provided has helped you.
I always advise many people like you to use the CCHB  to get a refund of the reservation fee.

I must say that £1,000 reservation fee seems very high.  I would think £500 is sufficient.
Asking around it would appear reservation fees might well be linked to the price of the home or particular development. New homebuyers can expect to part with anything from £200 to £2,000 as a reservation fee.
This should form part of the payment for the home. Be sure everyone to check that your solicitor knows you have paid as a reservation fee!

House builders can keep a proportion to cover their "expenses" provided they have not  caused you to withdraw by withholding information or misleading information.
 
Taylor Wimpey sales saying you can only have 50% deposit back at the outset is just plain wrong!
By the way, you should have been GIVEN a copy of the Code on Reservation.
Failure to do so is a breach of requirement 1.2!

On the face of it,  you may have had a lucky escape!
 

[Andy29]

I think we may have done!
We have friends on the estate we were looking at who've had all sorts of problems.
They've had problems with back garden drainage and freezing cold 3rd floor. Some of these are snagging things that are rectifiable but its the permanent things you find out later after the excitement wears off that you end up having to live with. 
So their boiler is in a kitchen cupboard taking away much needed kitchen storage space. They can't even have a proper bath because the safety drainage is set so low! All things people might not pick up on when they're dreaming the dream walking around the showhouse!
I think another consistent factor with new builds is hot water supply. It seems pretty consistent that they put smallish system boilers in which heat the house OK but one person struggles to have a decent sized bath and the next needs to wait an hour before it fills up again. We had that problem in our old Wimpey home and our friends are having the same issues.
Any house builder is never going to rip out the boiler to put a larger one in though so you are stuck with it. We've just put a combi into the our new property and its like chalk and cheese.

Not ideal when they've paid around £450,000 and the extra "privilege" of paying a £150 a year landscaping maintenance charge for their "wetland area" (aka flood defence system).

[New Home Expert]

Every new home will have drawbacks and disadvantages.
People are buying them because they can (due to Help to Buy) not because they should.

Flooding problems in rear gardens are a particular common problem at the moment. House builders are only required by NHBC standards, to ensure the area up to 3 metres away from the home is not flooded.

The charging management fees for private roads, open spaces etc is also becoming more common too!