Ottawa's Best Home Builders

Objective

To create a credible builder ratings system, based on builder performance data collected by authoritative third-party organizations, and empirical data provided by customers, that enables home buyers to properly assess home builders' historic performance, to help them arrive at their own, independent conclusions about Ottawa's best home builders.

Assumptions

A consolidated Pro Builder Rating should be comprised generally of three components - the quality of the builder's work, the degree to which they reciprocally and transparently interact with customers and the community as a whole, and the manner in which they engage with customer disputes.  To reflect the comparative significance and veracity of available data, we weight these components 40%, 40% and 20% respectively.

When we began rating builder performance ten years ago, there were few metrics available, and business performance evaluation by the general public was dubious when generalized. Since then, several changes have taken place, and we have now updated our methodoloy accordingly.

Most significantly, attitudes about the public accountability of businesses have matured considerably. Whereas public ratings previously were skewed due to evaluations being provided mostly by the aggrieved, since then a culture of responsible and fair assessment by both the aggrieved and the delighted has become normalized, providing the basis for a reasonable assumption of balance.

This has been enabled largely by platforms such as Google Reviews, the most ubiquitous, easy to use and compelling feedback tool. It provides a means by which home buyers and builders can engage in an open dialogue, should they choose to, leading presumably to better outcomes for both, due to the public nature of their discourse.

Additionally, far-sighted home builders have completely embraced this new public accountability, not only by engaging fully with the Google Reviews and Better Business Bureau complaints resolution process, but also by engaging fully with third-party customer survey agents that they themselves commission to fully assess and share publically the level of satisfaction experienced by their own customers.

Lastly, with the formation of the Home Construction Regulatory Authority (HCRA) in 2021 to manage the regulatory process previously undertaken by the Tarion Home Warranty Program, performance data is now more granular and current, allowing us to more appropriately weight data points to better differentiate builders from one another.

Builder Quality - 40%

The Home Construction Regulatory Authority (HCRA) publishes up to ten years of performance data for each Ontario home builder. This data captures builder output volume, the number of reported deficiencies and defects, and the cost. We make numerous calculations to arrive at a Builder Quality score.

Builder Quality Score Reductions

It must be noted that in this jurisdiction the home building industry is well-regulated, and most registered builders that we review rarely have quality problems that contravene regulation, and these tend to be relatively superficial, small-ticket items that quickly get resolved as a condition of the builder's continued registration, as opposed to being structural in nature and of significant cost to remediate.

Nonetheless, our Quality Score reflects the claims made by home owners through the Home Construction Regulatory Authority (HCRA), the nature of the claim, and the cost for remediation, proportionate to the total number of homes delivered by the builder in the last ten years.

Customer Engagement- 40%

Degree of customer engagement signals the extent of a home builder's willingness to conduct their business in a transparent, fair and responsive manner, and this includes engaging in open dialogue with customers and the community about issues of mutual concern. We factor in six individual signals to arrive at a Customer Engagement score.

We no longer attribute much weighting to "social media presence" because it's seldom used to actually engage in genuine dialogue. We give much more weight to a builder's proactive engagement with platforms such as Google Reviews, Avid Ratings, Consumer Choice Award or this one.

These platforms provide and disseminate business and consumer information of a higher veracity, because they enable builders to engage in an open and transparent dialogue with customers and the community, signaling their willingness to be publically accountable.

Customer Dispute Engagement - 20%

The Better Business Bureau serves in a capacity to help resolve disputes between home buyers and builders, and publishes performance data for those home builders who fully engage with the mediated process in a spirit of goodwill and transparency.

Customer Engagement Score Reductions

Tract home building is a commodity market where builders compete for the same customers largely on price, location and features, in that order. They use largely the same materials and building sub-trades, and so have similar costs and similar margins. In a well-regulated, highly competitive commodity market such as Ottawa's, a significant differentiator between home builders is Customer Service. Some builders widen their margins at the expense of Customer Service, while others recognize superior Customer Service as a competitive advantage.

Building new homes and new home communities is a highly complex endeavor, with an enormous number of moving parts, over a period of many years. The significant issue is not whether problems will occur, but rather the approach that home builders take to resolve them when inevitably they do.

While we cannot actually measure the internal Customer Service processes of builders, what we can measure is their public consequences.

Our Customer Engagement Scores measure social media engagement, published customer reviews, the results from customer surveys undertaken by third-parties, and the extent of transparent engagement in successful dispute resolution mediated by the Better Business Bureau.