Less than one in five people would like to live in a newly-built home, according to a YouGov survey.
The poll found that just 18% of adults said they would “prefer to live in” a house that was built in the last ten years.
This compares with 24% who wanted to live in a house built between 10 and 50 years ago, 23% in a home built between 50 and 100 years ago and 17% in a house that was built over a century ago.
The survey did not ask why people wanted to live in an older home. But the country’s biggest housebuilders have hit the headlines in recent years for constructing properties that have saddled new homeowners with poorly finished houses and very high ground rents.
Last month, Barratt, Taylor Wimpey, Redrow and Bellway were among 100 firms that signed up to a new code of practice to ensure that complaints surrounding new build homes are resolved quickly and effectively.
The code will be overseen by industry body the New Homes Ombudsman Service which has a remit that “covers the whole period from the reservation and legal completion of a property through to after-sales and complaints management for issues during the first two years of a new home purchase”.
Among the types of misconduct the code will attempt to clamp down on are high-pressure selling, the poor protection of customer deposits and ensuring that developers hand over ‘complete’ homes to customers.
In August, The Competition and Markets Authority secured agreements from nine building firms that bought freeholds from Taylor Wimpy to remove their double ground rent terms, which will see a further 5,000 UK households receive refunds.
The regulator said at the time that the action was part of its ongoing investigation into ground rent cases, which began in 2019, and has so far benefited over 20,000 households.
YouGov contacted a representative sample of 4,790 UK adults on 1 November.
