A day in the life of a site manager

Chris Matthews is an award-winning site manager at the prestigious Leithfield Park development by David Wilson Homes in Milford, Surrey. He tells us what his days consists of in his role as a site manager, and what sets the Leithfield Park development  the rest…

He says….

As site manager, I’m in charge of the day-to-day running of Leithfield Park, so that involves a range of daily activities; from liaising with all the subcontractors, to dealing with customers and neighbours, managing materials and overseeing build programmes.  There is such a wide range of activity on a new homes site like this and as the development progresses it means that no two days or in fact any month is the same.

Typically on a standard day, when I get onto site in the morning the first thing I do is to check my emails and make a plan for the day. I often receive emails from customers, and as part of our dedicated, continuous customer care as a five-star housebuilder we tend to the customer’s needs after the house is completed. Just this morning I received an email from a customer asking if we could fix a broken tap in the house which was something we were able to do quickly. The thing is that sometimes when building new homes, sometimes things can go wrong, but it’s the quick and efficient way that we deal with it that makes the difference in the eyes of the customer.

To ensure that every house is built to the highest standards, we follow David Wilson Homes’ standard procedures. Upon completion, the properties undergo numerous inspections – perhaps around four before the Customer Care Team come in to manage the property. This is to ensure that all of our new homes are built to the highest standard before they are made available to our customers.

We were recently awarded with the bronze award for the Considerate Construction Awards at Leithfield Park which is an achievement that I am especially proud of.  This means that we have built our high quality development here with respect to the local community and have also been recognised as courteous builders. Aside from the extra lengths that we have taken onsite to be good neighbours, we have done a great deal of work with the local community. We even hosted a day on site for 16-year-old A-Level students so they could see the various roles available at a building site, and they even got them to lay some bricks.

We build all the generous homes here at Leithfield Park to a very high specification, and no two houses are exactly the same. There is an incredible sense of satisfaction when we’ve finished a site. It’s brilliant, the houses look great and I love looking at the site and able to say, ‘I built that!’. These houses have been built on the site of the old Milford Hospital, so it’s undergone a dramatic change, and it’s amazing to see how the place looks today. Believe me when I say, a lot goes into it!