Customers have been left high and dry after their building company went bust and tradies rushed out to strip their sites bare.

Earlier this month, news.com.au revealed that DC Living Pty Ltd, trading under the names Living Homes VIC and Living Homes QLD, went into administration.

The builder, headquartered in Brisbane, had undertaken more than $10 million worth of construction work since July and had at least 29 active sites on its books, according to the Queensland Building and Construction Commission (QBCC).

The appointed administrators, Daniel Quinn and David Stimpson of insolvency firm SV Partners, informed creditors that DC Living had ceased trading and the QBCC has since cancelled its building licence.

One customer, Jamie*, who preferred not to share his last name, said there is “no end in sight” despite he and his partner first signing a building contract two years ago in the hopes they would by now be living in their dream home.

In another blow to the homeowner, less than 24 hours after DC Living went bust, the fencing and the skip bin was ripped out of his building site, as frustrated tradies tried to reduce their losses.

“Basically we found out on the Friday that they (DC Living) had gone under,” Jamie told news.com.au. “We were like ‘Oh my god’.”

Then over the weekend, the tradies came and took their stuff back from his site, leaving some rubbish behind in the process.

News.com.au understands other customers have had a similar experience.

What Jamie finds particularly galling is that less than two weeks before DC Living went under, he had made a substantial progress payment to the builder which was nearly six figures.

And just a few days before administrators were appointed, the construction firm had installed a garage door at his near-completed $600,000 house.

“From that perspective we were shocked” at the news of the external administration, Jamie said.

“I think some of the employees were even blindsided by it.”

Not only was he floored to learn of the company’s collapse, but he soon made another unwelcome discovery.

“We made a payment to DC Living less than two weeks ago for close to $100,000, for the completion of a build stage which they advised was complete,” he explained.

But he found that “the stage is not actually complete once we were able to visit the site and see for ourselves”.

He now has to rely on the long and onerous process of receiving last resort insurance to pay for the rest of his build.

Signs such as “pay up ya flog” have adorned the site of at least one DC Living build that news.com.au knows of.

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Ashton Close, a tradie who has been left $26,775 out of pocket over the debacle, said “it’s a disgrace”.

The brick renderer estimates that he’s worked at 133 sites in total during the four-year period that his business did work for DC Living.

“They’ve dragged the chain on paying us, they’ve said they need an extra couple of weeks,” Mr Close told news.com.au.

“Before Christmas we were just getting the run-around.

“They’ve stung us about $26,000. It hurts, it definitely hurts.”

According to the QBCC, DC Living’s record of residential construction work shows that it had 29 jobs in the state during the 2023/2024 financial period.

That came in at a total value of $10,224,965 worth of construction projects.

DC Living’s pipeline of work peaked in the 2020/21 reporting period.

The builder took on 87 jobs worth $31 million, which coincided with the government’s announcement of the HomeBuilder grant.

The following year, it had 76 construction projects on its books.

ASIC records show that Hugh Bridle and Angelo Augostis are co-directors of DC Living.

In a video on LinkedIn from a year ago, one of the directors, Mr Augostis, assured clients that DC Living was solvent, as seen in the video holder above.

“To be completely honest, DC Living is a financially viable business,” he said in a video from late 2022.

“We have consistently paid our suppliers on a fortnightly basis and will continue to do so for many moons to come.”

News.com.au attempted to contact the company for comment but the number was blocked.

As well as DC Living Pty Ltd, two other companies involved in the business group also collapsed on the same day.

Kalkamoning Pty Ltd and DC Living Administration Pty Ltd both appointed Daniel Quinn and David Stimpson as the liquidators.

“The companies operate within a group structure, whereby DC Living Pty Ltd is the main trading entity, DC Living Administration Pty Ltd is the main employing entity and Kalkamoning Pty Ltd is the previous trading entity,” the liquidators wrote.

The brickie, Ashton Close told news.com.au that his records showed he had worked on 29 build sites for Kalkamoning Pty Ltd during the four-year period he did contract work for them.

A statutory report on Kalkamoning Pty Ltd, sent out last week and obtained by news.com.au, said that three active builds had been impacted from its collapse.

There are 49 unsecured creditors owed $624,000.

Of that, $42,000 owed to the tax office while $487,000 is owed to trade creditors.

The financial situation of DC Living Pty Ltd is yet to be revealed to creditors.

News.com.au contacted the administrators of DC Living, who also couple as the liquidators of the other two entities, for comment.

*Name withheld over privacy concerns

alex.turner-cohen@news.com.au