Building Inspectors near you

There is an Australian Standard that pre-purchase building inspection reports must comply with, and New South Wales is unusually candid about its limits: the Standard does not cover style or content. That single caveat explains most of the frustration buyers report. Two inspectors can both comply and hand you documents that look nothing like each other, one twenty pages of photographs and one four pages of bullet points, because the Standard is setting the method rather than dictating the prose.

What this means practically is that comparing quotes on price alone compares nothing. Ask each inspector for a redacted sample report on a house of similar age and construction before you engage them. You are looking for whether defects are described with enough specificity that a builder could price the repair from the report, and whether the inspector distinguishes what they saw from what they inferred.

Ask, too, what edition of the Standard the engagement is written to and whether the timber pest work is being done to its own separate standard. A quote that names the documents it is working to is a quote from someone who has read them.

A pre-purchase inspection is visual and non-invasive. The inspector does not lift carpet, cut open a wall, move the vendor's furniture or dismantle anything, and in most Australian houses that rules out exactly the places problems live: the underside of a suspended floor with no access hatch, a roof space with no manhole or no safe footing, the back of a built-in wardrobe pushed against an external wall, and the ground under a slab.

The report will say which areas were inaccessible, and those lines are the most valuable paragraphs in the document. An inaccessible subfloor in a timber-floored Queenslander or a Melbourne weatherboard is not a formality; it is the single most likely place for termite damage and moisture to be sitting unseen. Read the inaccessibility list first and the defect list second.

If a significant area could not be entered, you have three choices: ask the agent for access to be arranged and the inspector to return, accept the risk knowingly, or make your offer conditional on it. What you should not do is assume that an area nobody looked at is an area with nothing in it.

New South Wales advises using a suitably qualified person, such as a licensed builder, a surveyor or an architect, and says the inspector must have adequate insurance cover, particularly for professional indemnity. That is not a nicety. A pre-purchase report is professional advice you relied on to spend a very large sum, and if it missed something it should have found, professional indemnity cover is the mechanism through which a claim can actually be met.

Ask for the certificate of currency, not a verbal assurance, and check the date and the sum insured. Ask also whether the policy is claims-made, which almost all professional indemnity policies are, because that means the cover has to still be in force when you make the claim rather than only when the report was written. An inspector who has retired or wound up the company takes the cover with them.

Read the engagement terms for limitation clauses too. A liability cap set at the fee for the inspection is a common term, and it turns the insurance question into a largely theoretical one. That is worth knowing before you engage, not after a wall moves.

For a freestanding house the inspection is entirely physical: someone walks the property, enters what can be entered, and writes down what they saw. For an apartment or a townhouse in a strata scheme the physical inspection covers much less than buyers expect. New South Wales notes that the inspector will normally only inspect and assess the condition of the interior and immediate exterior of the unit, and that common areas need a special request.

That is because in a strata scheme the expensive risks are not usually in your lot. They are in the roof, the facade, the waterproofing of the podium and the lifts, all of which belong to the owners corporation, and the way you find out about them is by reading the scheme's records rather than by looking at a wall. A strata report examines minutes, the sinking fund, levies, insurance and any defect or building bond history.

For a strata purchase, commission both. A clean physical inspection of a lot inside a building with a known facade defect and an empty capital works fund is a clean inspection of the wrong thing.