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Builders are in the driver's seat right now, and they know it, so getting good service or even just good communication can be difficult.

However their point is valid; the length of time it can take from one trade to the next to do the same job can vary quite a bit, and they have to plan many trades a long time in advance, so once a job slips it can be hard to bring it back up.

Right now I'm building a house with the same builder (in the same development too) as some friends.. they bought theirs a few months before ours, but we're ahead of them now and just had our post-framing walkthrough. I asked the guy from the builder about it, and he said it was because their framing crew took an extra week to do the job, and there were more issues that had to be resolved, in fact there's still some.. so while they started out with a hole in the ground and a basement poured about 2 months before us, we're now ahead of them and will probably take possession 2-3 weeks earlier.

I don't think it's realistic to expect the builder to juggle things around just so "who bought first" is maintained.. I mean if they start cancelling and rescheduling all their trades, the trades get upset and go to another builder.

But I agree good communication should be expected, though again it's hard for them sometimes, because often they really don't know when it's going to be done either. Our builder basically came out at the outset and said to us that he wasn't going to give us a date, because we'd just end up being disappointed.