Home Quality Mark
Home Quality Mark Services
For all our clients we offer a tailored package of building compliance support services specifically designed to meet the project at hand.
The Home Quality Mark (HQM) is a national standard for new homes, which uses a simple 5-star rating to provide impartial information from independent experts on a new home’s design, construction quality and running costs.
The Home Quality Mark aims to enable housing developers to showcase the quality of their new homes, and identify them as having the added benefits of being likely to need less maintenance, cheaper to run, better located, and better able to cope with the demands of a changing climate – The ratings are achieved by way of credits earned towards 3 major categories:
Knowledge Sharing
The Processes that enhance understanding and co-operation between the designer, constructor, client and householder.
Our Surroundings
The ability of homes to work with current and future surroundings.
My Home
The provision of living spaces that are comfortable, healthy, cost effective and have reduced environmental impacts.
Independent, accredited professionals assess and score a wide range of aspects of a new home to give an overall quality rating. This 5-star rating makes it easy to quickly compare different homes in terms of their overall performance.
To provide greater clarity on how the home performs, indicators based on the key interests of the major participants such as home occupants, developers and planners are also rated. Indicators from a householder perspective for example are householder costs, positive impact on health and wellbeing and environmental footprint. Over time further indicators will be developed from different perspectives including those of developers, financial institutions, landlords and local authorities.
The Home Quality Mark is not yet mandatory, however more and more developers are going to extra lengths to build high quality homes, perhaps exceeding Building Regulation requirements, but may not have the appropriate measurements of quality to persuade customers of their benefits.
Here at ATSPACE our certified assessors are able to carry out both HQM and BREEAM Assessments and we are able to provide your project with full ‘end-to-end support’ including initial advice and guidance, design stage assessments and a post-construction reviews, all of which will include preparation and filing of all required reports.
Skilled & qualified
HQM assessors
End-to-end
building compliance service
Fast turnaround
for all reports
Best price
guarantee
During the first stage of the HQM Assessment process, our accredited assessor will meet with the project team to:
• Provide advice and an initial view on the sustainability of the proposed development
• Advise on elements that require inclusion in the detailed design planning phase
• Respond to queries from the project team
• Agree an ‘action plan’ – documenting what is required to achieve the desired HQM rating.
Once the detailed drawings and specifications have been completed, our assessor will:
• Assess the building against the HQM scheme’s credit criteria
• Assign ‘credits’ based upon information and evidence supplied by the project team
• Produce an ‘interim report’ calculating the potential rating to be achieved if all agreed criteria are met
Upon completion of the development our assessor will conduct a full on-site visit to:
• Ensure the construction meets commitments made at the design stage with evidence from the project team
• Produce the final HQM Assessment report and arrange for submission to the BRE
