The garden room industry is made up of a group of talented, dedicated and professional people who have great loyalty to their customers, and ensure that the service they offer and the buildings they produce meets and hopefully exceeds their clients expectations.
Over the last few years the garden room industry has grown significantly, and some people have seen this growth as an opportunity.
During the last couple of days we have had a number of emails about a new company we featured in August 2013.
Its not unusual to be sent computer generated images of new garden room designs and specifications and it is these materials we base our initial review when there is no physical building.
As it turns out the images we were sent we’re not the work of this supplier, but the designs of another supplier. In fact the companies updated website (checked 13 May 2013) was using the images of several different garden room suppliers. We have since removed all articles from The Garden Room Guide.
Today we have received an email from a customer who unfortunately lost a deposit payment to this company.
This doesn’t happen often
As we said at the start of the article the garden room industry is made up of reputable suppliers, this sort of problem doesn’t happen often.
How can you protect yourself?
There are some key steps you can take to check your chosen supplier before you place an order:
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- We like to give a new garden room supplier a voice on The Garden Room Guide, but do a search of the site to see and read subsequent articles we have written. Most garden room suppliers will send us photos of garden room builds in the months following an initial review – if there’s only one article on the site and its a long time ago, think why?
- When viewing a suppliers website are all the images real or are they all computer generated (CGI)? CGI are very sophisticated these days, but you can often tell by looking at the grass or plants around the garden room. If all the images are CGI ask yourself ‘have they built any real buildings’?
- Look at a suppliers images gallery. Are all the images different angles of the same building, if so they may have only built the one room.
- Again looking at the suppliers website do the garden rooms shown have the same style – each garden room supplier has a style, they use a certain colour window, all the roofs have overhangs or they use a certain type of cladding. If the garden rooms offered all look very different you could find that the images have been clipped from other suppliers websites.
- Ask to see a previous building or speak to a previous customer, if a supplier has nothing to hide they will happily arrange this for you.
- Check a website like Duedil to see how long the supplier has been in business.
- Don’t hand over any money until you have checked all of this and you have a proper set of drawings, and have read the contract, terms of sale, specification etc.
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We don’t want to scare you 95% of garden room sales are trouble free, but with a growing industry rogue traders are appearing, so just be aware.
We have been duped by this supplier too, we too have a relationship of trust with the garden room suppliers that the photos and specifications they send us are theirs and correct at the time of publication.
So, we just wanted to pass on our concerns.
