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Work health and safety law separates two registrations. The design of certain plant is registered once by the manufacturer, importer or supplier, who is prohibited from supplying plant whose design is not registered. The individual item is then registered by the person with management or control of it, after a competent person has deemed it safe to operate. Lifts appear on both lists, which is why a reputable supplier can quote you a design registration number without hesitation.

Because the rules come from each state and territory's own work health and safety regulator, the paperwork and the fees differ across the country. New South Wales, for example, handles a private-residence lift on a downloadable form rather than through its online system, and charges nothing to register a single-dwelling lift. Check with your own regulator rather than assuming the arrangement is national; assuming is how a lift ends up commissioned but unregistered.

Keep the registration, the design registration number, the commissioning report and the service log together in one place. They are the documents a buyer's conveyancer will ask for, and they are the documents that tell a new service company what it is working on.

The National Construction Code classifies a detached house, and each of a group of attached dwellings separated by a fire-resisting wall, as Class 1a. Putting a lift into a Class 1a building is ordinary residential building work: it cuts a hole through a floor, it usually needs a slab or a thickened footing under the car, and in a two storey house it interferes with the framing that was carrying the upper floor.

That makes it structural, and structural work needs an engineer's design and a building approval in every Australian state and territory. Who issues that approval differs: in some states a private building certifier or registered building surveyor, in others the council. The lift company will often say it handles approvals, and many do, but the obligation to hold a valid approval rests with the owner, so ask to see it rather than taking the assurance.

A residential lift is serviced on the manufacturer's schedule, and the schedule is not optional in any meaningful sense: it is the evidence that the plant has been kept safe to operate, and it is what an insurer will look for after an incident. Set up the agreement at handover, while you still have the supplier's attention, and make sure it names response times as well as visit frequency.

The question worth asking before you buy, rather than after, is who else can service the machine. Some proprietary residential lifts can only be maintained by the company that sold them, which is fine until that company leaves the market or your state. Ask how many independent technicians in your city are trained on the model, and how long the manufacturer commits to supplying parts.