Most housebuilders treat the defects liability period as a known cost of doing business. It gets budgeted for in broad terms, staffed with a customer care team, and reviewed when something escalates. What rarely happens is anyone asking the more useful question: across all our active sites, what keeps coming back, and why?
That question is answerable. The data to answer it already exists inside the business. It is just scattered across inboxes, spreadsheets, contractor portals and job sheets, in a shape nobody can interrogate quickly.
Where the pattern hides
Defect jobs do not arrive as a set. They arrive one at a time, over months, across different plots, handled by different people. Each one looks manageable on its own, and each one gets closed on its own. Nothing in that process connects job 12 on Plot 8 to job 41 on Plot 63, even when they are the same failure.
The leak points are predictable, but they only become visible when the record is consolidated:
The same appliance or component failing across a run of plots, because a single batch or supplier is the common factor and nobody has joined the jobs up
A material or detail that generates repeat call-backs on one house type and almost none on another, which points at the specification rather than the workmanship
Repeat defects concentrated in one trade or one contractor across multiple sites, each rectified individually with no cumulative record
Jobs logged against generic categories, so the reporting shows how many defects were closed but not what caused them
Evidence trails split across emails and separate systems, leaving nothing auditable to take into a conversation with a supplier or subcontractor
Volume makes this worse rather than better. A regional or national portfolio generates hundreds of rectification jobs across a liability period. The pattern is in there. Nobody has the time to find it by reading job sheets.
Why it matters commercially
When a defect dispute escalates beyond the developer, the developer usually loses. The New Homes Ombudsman Service has handled more than 11,000 enquiries and complaints since launch and upholds around 70% of resolved cases (New Homes Ombudsman Service, evidence to Parliament, 2025). Under the New Homes Quality Code, developers must provide a full after-sales service for at least two years from completion, and customers have that window to escalate.
The businesses that come out of that well are not the ones with the biggest customer care teams. They are the ones that fixed the cause after the third occurrence rather than the 40th.
What changes with the right record
The problem is not that Directors do not care about defect performance. It is that board packs show closure rates and open job counts. They rarely show that one drylining contractor accounts for a large share of call-backs across three sites, or that a single house type produces twice the defect volume of the rest of the portfolio.
Ubrix Reporting and Integrations gives Directors one view of every defect raised across the liability period, segmented by development, contractor, trade, house type and defect category. Live dashboards show defect volume, status and ageing per plot, site and region without anyone pulling numbers from separate systems and reconciling them by hand. When a repeat failure emerges, it is visible while it is still three plots rather than 40.
That record also changes supply chain conversations. Instead of arguing from memory and a partial email trail, you arrive with a complete, auditable history of every job, when it was raised, who attended and how often the same failure has recurred. It supports procurement decisions, it supports specification changes, and it gives commercial teams something concrete to put in front of a contractor.
Reporting and Integrations feeds into Power BI and existing board reporting. Export takes seconds rather than a day of manual compilation.
Start here
If your current reporting cannot tell you which components, materials and trades generate most of your defect work, that pattern is repeating whether you can see it or not. Book a short demo to see how Ubrix turns two years of defect jobs into something you can act on.