Who cares?

On 19 October when the National Housing Customer Satisfaction Survey results were publicly launched by industry-improving organisation the Housing Forum, the Financial Times seized on the story with the headline: "Four out of five buyers find defects in newly built houses, survey shows", and Beazer Homes, purely coincidentally, found itself in the firing line of BBC Television's Watchdog Rottweilers in spite of its much-publicised customer care policy. The combination of events hardly inspired the industry to greater things as the survey intends.

But whatever your view of the survey, it is here, and it looks like it's not going away. Sir Michael Pickard, chairman of the Housing Forum has confirmed it will be repeated next year. "There's a lot of fine tuning that needs to take place, but it is an important benchmark in the industry drive to performance improvement," he told an audience of 400, which included the chief executives of many of the plc homebuilders, who had assembled in London for the launch of the initial results: a table of homebuilder performance and overall industry findings.

Of the 59 homebuilders covered by Mori's phone survey of 10 000 homebuyers Crest Homes, Harwood Homes, JS Bloor, Jelson, McLean Homes, Midland and General, and Redrow Homes all achieved top three-star ratings across seven measures in the table. The measures cover quality of home, homebuilder service and that all-important willingness of buyers to recommend their homebuilders to others. Lowest rated were Barratt, Beazer Homes, Charles Church, and David McLean Homes.

For others, there are hints of good and bad scores, incomplete because the small number of their buyers surveyed did not enable Mori to give a score. Less than half the firms featured have a full set of seven measures and three firms, Trencherwood, Birch and Tulloch, have no measures at all. "We are hoping next year to build a better database of phone numbers," says Toby Taper, director of Mori Research. "It highlights the fact that sampling is and always will be the biggest challenge in this," says Malcolm Pitcher, marketing consultant. "I respect Mori's decision. But some homebuilders will be bemused that they are part of it and are not able to determine how they've done." Homebuyers are likely to be bemused too, although the best-performing homebuilders are wasting no time in promoting their star status.

Still, many homebuilders are taking the survey, and their own performance within it, extremely seriously. "We accept that there have been instances where we have not been able to meet all customer expectations," admits John Low, chief executive of Beazer Group, which achieved a low ranking in spite of, or perhaps because of, its widely-promoted customer care programme, the Beazer Plus Promise.

"There are some aspects, particularly the after-sales service and the industry's ability to meet deadlines, which are cause for concern and in need for improvement," says Martin Donohue, chief executive of Westbury and chair of the Housing Forum's customer satisfaction survey working group. "We're pleased, but we'll still be trying to do better," says John Calcutt, group chief executive of Crest Nicholson. "Any homebuilder who takes a complacent attitude to this may regret it in five years' time," says marketing expert Pitcher. "I hope in a year's time we will be able to say that the industry has improved."

Mori's researchers asked more than 20 questions about the home, requesting answers mainly in a graded rating, ranging from very satisfied to very dissatisfied, but by no means all answers are included in the table. Homebuilder service made up the first half of the questionnaire and the remainder dealt with the home itself.

The survey saved its two most crucial questions - on referral and willingness to buy new again - until last. "We were hoping to be able to draw comparisons here between other industries," says Mori's Taper. "But homebuilding is unique in the size of the purchase and the complexity of decisionmaking so it can't be compared to other industries." For the moment, however, comparisons between homebuilders seem to have given the industry quite enough to think about.