Residential Builders Editing and Proofreading Services

A couple sign for a house they cannot see. What they are buying exists as a plan, a showhome with a different kitchen, and a specification document listing items followed by the words "or similar". Eighteen months later they move into a house where the taps are different, the tiles are different, the garden is smaller than the drawing suggested, and every one of those changes was permitted by a document they read once, at a desk, in a sales office.

We edit what housebuilders and residential contractors produce — specification and finishes schedules for buyers, allowance and provisional sum documentation, choices and upgrade documentation, reservation and contract information for purchasers, plot-specific variation records, home demonstration and handover documentation, homeowner manuals and appliance information, warranty and defect reporting guidance, snagging and inspection processes, construction stage and completion date communications, and post-occupancy and customer care correspondence. Our editors work on the document a buyer relies on.

The specification and finishes schedule is where a housebuilder's relationship with a buyer is either honest or set up for disappointment, and its failure is the phrase "or similar". A schedule naming a product and reserving the right to substitute an equivalent has promised nothing, and the buyer does not know that. We work through these so anything that may change is identified as such at the point it appears, with what will govern the substitute — the same range, the same finish, the same price band — since a buyer who knows the tap may change accepts it and a buyer who discovers it does not; so allowances are stated as sums with a worked example of what they buy, because "generous kitchen allowance" is a feeling and £4,200 including installation is a fact; so what is genuinely fixed is marked as fixed, given that this is what makes the flexible items believable; so the drawings' status is explained plainly, covering which dimensions are approximate, that furniture shown is not included, and that garden sizes and boundary treatments may change; so the choices deadline is given as a date with what happens after it, as this is the housebuilding equivalent of a design freeze; and so anything that will be different from the showhome is listed rather than left to be noticed. Schedules written this way produce buyers who complete without a solicitor's letter.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including specifications, plot records and buyer correspondence. We are editors rather than housebuilders, surveyors or legal advisers, and we offer no view on specification, contract terms or consumer obligations. What we can do is make the buyer's expectation match what will actually be built.