There is no qualification required. No registration. No licence. The title is completely unregulated, and most people buying a house have no idea.
Ours is a registered building contractor. You can check the number yourself on the Building and Energy register — which is the point.
The east coast builds brick veneer over a timber frame. Perth builds double brick. Almost every “common building defects” article on the Australian internet was written for the other one.
Cavity wall ties corroding where you cannot see them. Weep holes rendered shut. Mortar droppings bridging the cavity and carrying water from the outer leaf to the inner one. Articulation joints missing from a long masonry wall. None of that exists in a brick-veneer house, and none of it turns up in advice written for Sydney.
Then there is the ground. Perth is not one soil. The coastal strip is Tamala limestone and sand, and it eats anything metal. The south-eastern corridor is reactive clay, and it lifts slabs. The northern corridor is deep sand over poorly compacted fill. The Hills are laterite on a slope. A house in Baldivis and a house in Cottesloe fail in completely different ways.
You have an offer accepted and a clock running.
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Perth sits in one of the highest termite-pressure regions in the country.
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Buying a unit, villa or apartment.
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Your new home is finished and the builder wants your signature.
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You are building, and you want it checked as it goes up.
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Settlement is imminent.
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Excavation, demolition or construction is about to begin nearby.
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You own the problem and you need it diagnosed.
Read more →Perth roof battens, quietly losing their strength to salt air. It is the most argued-about finding in this industry, and the argument is worth real money to you.
Lignin is what binds the fibres in timber together. Airborne salt and pollutants break it down, and the timber goes soft and fibrous — “hairy timber”. It shows up first in tile battens, then in the rafters. It is not rot and it is not termites. It is chemistry, and it does not reverse.
125 of the 338 suburbs we cover sit within 5 km of the coast — the band where industry guidance says you should expect to find it in tile battens. That is 37% of our service area.
We disagree, and we will show you exactly why — including the argument against us, and who is making it. Read the whole argument →
Not NCAT. Not Fair Trading. The Building Commissioner, and then the State Administrative Tribunal.
There is a 14-day notice you have to serve first. There is a six-year window for a building service complaint, and a three-year one for a contract dispute. There is a $100,000 ceiling on what the Commissioner can order without both sides agreeing. Almost nobody explains this properly, because almost every building-inspection website in Perth is running content imported from Sydney.
Plain explanations of how inspections work and what we find in Perth homes.
A pre-purchase building inspection is the one most people mean when they say "get the building inspected." You have an offer accepted, or you are about to make one, and before the deal becomes unconditional you want someone who is not the seller, not the agent, and not emotionally attached to the house to walk through it and tell you what is actually wrong with it. That is the whole job. But what it covers, and what it deliberately does not, is worth understanding before you book one, because a report that surprises you at settlement is usually a report you did not read closely enough at the start.
Read more →When people book a timber pest inspection, almost everyone is thinking about termites. Termites are the headline act, and fairly so — they do the most damage the fastest, and a bad infestation can cost more than any other single defect in a house. But a timber pest inspection to Australian Standard AS 4349.3 covers three separate things, not one, and the other two are quietly responsible for a lot of the timber damage we find in Perth homes.
Read more →Thermal imaging is the most oversold tool in the inspection industry, and also one of the most useful, and both of those things are true at once. A thermal camera in the hands of someone who understands what it is actually showing them can flag a hidden leak or a patch of missing insulation in seconds. The same camera, sold as an X-ray machine that "sees termites through walls," sets an expectation it cannot meet.
Read more →Tell us about the property and what you need. We'll come back to you with a firm quote and a time.
PERTH