Tim Austin’s Facebook response: captured 29 September 2026

For anyone considering

Affordable Modular Buildings

Yesterday, I posted a one star Google review about our experience with Tim Austin, the owner of Affordable Modular Buildings. They were brought in by Expandify, the company Mum bought her home from, and I dealt directly with Tim.

In our case, he was asking Mum to pay almost $70,000 before the payment milestone in her signed contract had been reached and no project plan had been provided.

I told him the invoice wasn't due yet, and to deal with me, not Mum, because the stress of this project had already led to cardiac investigations.

He called her anyway. Mum says he spent more than ten minutes pressuring her to pay while she cried.

That put her health at risk and I still cannot get past the fact he chose to do it after being told exactly why he should not contact her.

At around 2am this morning, Affordable Modular Buildings replied to my review saying they'd investigate the matter and improve "staff training and oversight". Which is a bit odd, given my complaint is about the conduct of the person who owns the company.

It did make me go and read their other reviews properly. There are plenty of five-star ones, but I think the one-star reviews, especially read together, are worth sharing.

The same themes keep coming up. Major delays, poor communication, disputes over extra costs and things going downhill when customers start asking questions or wanting proper answers.

People describe being pressured, spoken to aggressively, threatened with cancellation, having projects cancelled and in one case, being afraid to leave a review at all.

Then there are Affordable Modular Buildings responses underneath them. Defensive. Combative. Very quick to make the customer the problem.

We are talking about people's life savings and housing security. I'm still furious about what Tim Austin did to my Mum and I'm not interested in watching it get brushed off as a customer service issue.

Please, whoever you build with, get a solicitor to review your contract before you sign. And read the negative reviews. Are they one-off disgruntled customers or a pattern worth taking seriously?

I've redacted the reviewers names because I haven't asked permission to republish them here. The reviews are publicly available on Affordable Modular Buildings Google profile if anyone wants to verify them.

https://share.google/5IzYMaJKRzkxODxxy

And for those who haven't seen my previous post, our family nightmare is documented here: https://thegrannyflatfiles.com.au/

After the way Tim Austin berated and frightened my 60-year-old mum while pressuring her to make an almost $70k payment early, I would never give Affordable Modular Buildings my money.

Mum’s modular home was purchased through Expandify. After more than a year of delays, Expandify brought AMB directly into the project, and I dealt personally with Tim Austin from AMB during their involvement.

AMB may build perfectly good homes. They withdrew before Mum’s installation, so I can’t comment on that.

This review is for anyone who thinks the ethics, judgement and conduct of the people they’re handing their money to matters just as much as the finished product.

On an early call, Tim positioned himself as my “friend” while telling me that if I continued down the legal path he’d have to stop what he was doing, that “nothing’s going to get done” and things would “get real ugly”.

I took that pretty plainly: back off the lawyer and QBCC process, or Mum’s house doesn’t move forward.

But I’m not going to be intimidated into giving up legal rights because Tim says so.

On 10 August, Tim sent Mum a $67,200.91 invoice before the payment was contractually due.

The invoice was payable to Expandify, with Tim saying the money would then be transferred to AMB under his oversight.

I gave Tim the contract terms, explained why we weren’t paying early and asked for the invoice to be withdrawn.

In the same correspondence I told him Mum was not to be contacted because she was undergoing cardiac investigations following significant stress associated with the project.

He called Mum anyway.

He spent more than ten minutes pressuring her to pay early and talking over her while she cried.

Mum says he told her Expandify couldn’t afford the port costs without the money, that she might not get her house, Expandify could go under and she could lose everything she’d already paid. He complained that customers with lawyers were “kicking up a stink” and raised that he could “pull the plug”.

He initially told Mum he was calling to get my number and would call me straight away.

Which rather begs the question of why getting my phone number turned into more than ten minutes of pressuring a crying woman about a payment that wasn’t even due yet.

When I spoke to Tim the next day, he told me he’d called because he needed to find out why the payment wasn’t going to be made.

He also claimed he had called and texted me. I have no record of either, and I’m still waiting for him to produce the call and text log he said existed.

From my perspective, the sequence looked like an attempt to bypass the authorised representative saying no and take the pressure directly to the more vulnerable person instead.

That conversation also revealed Tim seemed to have some pretty big feelings about customers asking questions he apparently thought they should just trust him on.

He talked repeatedly about his experience, how people needed to trust him, and said being questioned felt like “an instant slap in the face”.

We were asking basic questions: where was almost $70k going, why was it being demanded early, and what was the plan for Mum’s house?

When I tried to explain that trust isn’t built by spending most of a call talking at people about why they should trust you, Tim told me he didn’t need the feedback because he was out of the project anyway.

I suggested it might still be useful for his future customers.

Apparently not. He told me his future customers were fine and everything was going well in his business.

Fair enough. Future customers can decide for themselves whether this experience is relevant.

Good reviews when everything goes smoothly are one thing. How someone behaves when a customer asks basic, relevant questions or just wants straight answers tells me considerably more.

I just want people to be conscious of where they put their money, and please get a solicitor to review your building contracts before you sign. We wouldn’t be in this mess if we had.