Building investigation & diagnostics

Something is wrong and nobody can tell you why. Water is getting in. A crack is growing. The floor moves.

When you need it: You own the problem and you need it diagnosed.

What it costs

$440 flat feeinc. GST ($400 + GST)

Anyone can call themselves one

In Western Australia there is no qualification required to work as a building inspector. No registration, no licence, no minimum hours, nothing you can look up. A person who has never built anything can print a card, buy a moisture meter and start writing reports on the largest purchase most people ever make.

The title is unregulated. What is regulated is building work itself, and that distinction is the single most useful thing a buyer can understand before choosing who to engage.

The one thing you can actually verify

Builders are registered through the Building Services Board, which sits inside Building and Energy, and the register is public. A registration number is checkable in a minute by anyone.

This business holds BC105819. Go and look it up. That sentence is the entire reason the number appears on every page of this site, and the reason worth noticing is what happens when you ask a competitor for theirs.

Questions worth asking before you book anyone

Are you registered, and what is the number? If the answer is a membership of an association rather than a registration, those are different things. Associations set their own entry requirements. The Board is statutory.

Will you enter the roof space? Most of what matters in a Perth house is up there, and plenty of inspections never leave the ground. Ask what would stop you, and listen for whether the answer is specific.

What standard is the report written to, and does it include timber pest? A building inspection reports against AS 4349.1, which excludes timber pest activity by name. If you want pests covered you need a second scope under AS 4349.3, and an operator who is vague about that is a problem in waiting.

How long after the inspection do I get the report? Not how long after booking. After the inspection. Inside a contract clause the difference is the whole point.

Will there be photographs? A written description of cracking is arguable in a negotiation. A photograph is not.

What experience actually changes

Not the checklist. The checklist is much the same for everyone, because the standard sets it.

What changes is the reading. Knowing that a house in a particular decade was built a particular way, and looking there first. Knowing that a row of blisters across a ceiling in a straight line is the fixing letting go rather than a paint defect. Knowing that cracking on reactive clay means something different from the same crack on leached sand, and that the ground under Perth changes as you move inland. Knowing which battens go soft near the coast, and which do not.

None of that is exotic. It is the difference between someone who inspects houses and someone who has built them.

What we do, and where to start

If you have an offer accepted and a clause running, you want a pre-purchase inspection, and in most of Perth you want the timber pest scope with it.

If you are building, staged inspections catch things while they are still cheap. If your builder wants a signature at completion, that is a practical completion inspection.

If something has already gone wrong, expert reporting is a different engagement again.

What a registered building contractor brings to an inspection

There is a difference between someone who inspects houses and someone who has built them. A registered building contractor has stood on the other side of the job: ordered the slab, set out the frame, argued with a bricklayer about articulation joints, and signed off work they were liable for. That experience changes what an inspector sees. A defect is not just a crack; it is a crack that tells you something about how the footing was designed, how the ground moves, and whether the builder allowed for it. Reading a house backwards, from the symptom to the decision that caused it, is what building experience gives you.

The standard and the judgement

An inspection runs to AS 4349.1, which sets the scope and the method: visual, non-invasive, readily accessible areas, reported against defined categories. The standard gives you consistency. What it cannot give you is judgement, and judgement is where an inspection earns its fee. Two inspectors can both see the same stepped cracking above a window. One records it. The other records it, recognises it as the signature of reactive-clay footing movement, checks whether the house has the articulation joints a current standard would want, looks at the trees and the stormwater that are drying or wetting the footing, and tells you whether this is cosmetic or structural. The standard defines the floor. The inspector's experience defines the ceiling.

What we look at, in order

The roof space usually decides the report, so where access is safe that is where the longest time goes: the framing, the batten and tie-down connections, the sarking, and any sign of water, pests or past repair. The subfloor, where there is one, is next, because moisture, ventilation and timber condition all live down there. Then the structure from outside: the footings' story told through the walls, the roof line, the wet areas where most water damage begins, and the site itself, the retaining, the drainage and the ground that everything sits on. Finishes come last, not because they do not matter, but because they are the easiest thing to see and the least likely to hide a five-figure problem.

The report you can act on

A report is only useful if it tells you what to do. Ours separates the cosmetic from the significant from the structural, says plainly where a specialist is needed and why, and is honest about what could not be seen. A report that lists forty trivial items with the same weight as one structural defect has failed you, because it buries the thing that matters. The job is to tell you what would change your decision, and to say it clearly enough that you can hold it up in a negotiation or take it to a builder for a quote.

The trap of the cheapest quote

When the inspection is the last box to tick before a settlement date, it is tempting to take the cheapest quote and the earliest slot. It is worth understanding what the cheap quote is often buying. A very low fee usually means volume: a large number of inspections a day, each one fast, each report largely templated. The inspector is in and out, the roof void gets a glance from the manhole rather than a crawl, the subfloor is skipped, and the report that lands is a long list of generic observations that could describe almost any house of that age. It reads thorough because it is long. It is not thorough, because length and detail are not the same thing.

A proper inspection takes time, and time costs money, which is most of why the fees vary. The inspector who crawls the full length of the roof space, gets into the subfloor, walks the whole exterior, and writes a report specific to your house cannot do eight of those in a day. The gap between a fast inspection and a careful one does not show up on the invoice. It shows up six months after settlement, when the problem the fast inspection missed becomes your problem, and by then the few hundred dollars you saved is not part of the conversation.

Why building experience reads a house differently

There is a real difference between someone trained to inspect houses and someone who has built them. A registered building contractor has been on the other side of the work: ordered the slab, set out the frame, argued with a bricklayer about where the articulation joints go, and put their name to work they were liable for if it failed. That history changes how a defect reads. A crack is not just a crack. It is a symptom that points back to a decision, about the footing, the ground, the detailing, and someone who has made those decisions can often read a house backwards from the symptom to the cause. That is the part of an inspection that judgement supplies and a checklist cannot.

It also changes what an inspector will commit to. Someone who has built knows the difference between a hairline crack that is doing nothing and a stepped crack that is telling you the footing is moving, and is willing to say which is which rather than photographing both and leaving you to worry equally about a cosmetic mark and a structural one. Knowing what does not matter is as valuable as knowing what does, and it is the kind of knowledge that comes from having watched houses be built and then watched how they behave.

What a good report is not

A good report is not the longest one. The most common failure we see in reports written by others is not that they miss things, though they do; it is that they bury the one finding that matters under thirty that do not. Forty items listed at equal weight, cosmetic marks sitting alongside structural movement, a scuffed skirting board given the same prominence as a cracked footing. Faced with that, a buyer under a contract deadline cannot tell the significant from the trivial, which means the report has failed at the one job it had.

Our reports separate findings into what is significant, what is minor, and what is ordinary maintenance, and they say plainly where a specialist is needed and why. Where something could not be reached, the report says so and says why, rather than staying silent and leaving you to assume it was checked. The test of a report is not how much it contains. It is whether, after reading it, you know what would change your decision and what you would do next.