What we look for in Alkimos, and why it differs from the suburb next door. 41.0 km from the CBD, on the coast, postcode 6038.
Alkimos is named after a Liberty ship that ran aground a few hundred metres offshore in the 1960s. The modern suburb is a State Government plan for a satellite city of around 55,000 people, and its population went from roughly 6,300 to over 10,200 between 2016 and 2021. Almost everything here is new.
New does not mean sound. It means a different list.
The suburb went up fast, in stages, with many builders competing for the same trades at once, and quality varies between stages and between builders working side by side. Establish which stage and which builder before anything else. On young houses the priorities are site classification, the depth and compaction of imported fill under the slab, and drainage, because extensive earthworks are how these estates get built and a slab that moves usually has a story underneath it.
Then there is salt. Alkimos is genuinely oceanfront, so salt is present from the day of handover. Coastal grade fixings, flashings, hardware and garage door components need to have been specified, and on volume builds they frequently were not. Inland grade fittings corrode fast in this air and the failures start showing within a few years.
One more thing. Buying into an active construction zone means noise, dust, heavy vehicles and changing road access for years, and it makes a dilapidation report genuinely worth having before the block next door is dug up.
New estates carry lower termite risk than old timber floored suburbs, but the risk is not zero and it arrives differently. These houses were built with a termite management system, either a physical barrier under and around the slab or a chemical treatment, and there should be a durable notice recording what was installed and when.
Find that notice. Then check whether anything has since defeated it. Landscaping is the usual culprit. Soil, mulch, paving or a new path built up over the slab edge bridges the barrier completely, and in a young estate where everyone is putting gardens in at once that happens constantly. Timber in ground contact gives colonies somewhere to establish. Decks and pergolas. Fencing. Retaining walls. The estates were also carved out of native banksia woodland, and retained vegetation on the fringes keeps local pressure up.
On a young house both inspections come down to the same few metres. The slab edge, the perimeter, the landscaping and the weep holes. An inspector checking drainage and slab edge exposure is looking at exactly the ground where a bridged barrier would show. One attendance, both reports, AS 4349.1 and AS 4349.3.
This is practical completion territory. Most buyers here are taking handover of a new build, and the PCI is the moment defects are still the builder's to fix at no cost to you. Building stage inspections during construction catch things earlier again, at slab, frame and lock up.
The inspection people forget is the one before the defect liability period expires. That window closes quietly and takes your rights with it. We also do dilapidation reports, pre-settlement inspections and strata work on the apartments and townhouses going up around the centre.
Alkimos is being built at enormous speed toward a planned population around 55,000, which means that for years buyers here are effectively living inside a construction zone. That makes a dilapidation report genuinely valuable, recording the condition of a home before neighbouring works begin, and it means noise, dust, heavy vehicles and shifting road access are ongoing realities rather than teething problems. The estates have gone up in rapid succession by multiple builders across stages, so quality varies stage to stage and builder to builder; establishing the stage and builder of a given house matters, and the sensible pattern is to inspect at handover and again before the defect-liability period expires.
Being oceanfront, salt is present from handover, so coastal-grade fixings, flashings, garage doors and hardware need to have been specified, and that is a common shortfall on volume builds, so it is one of the first things to check. The ground is coastal sand over limestone with extensive earthworks, which puts the site classification, and the depth and compaction of imported fill beneath the slabs, and the drainage, at the front of the inspection. An Alkimos inspection is really about reading a very new house on made-up coastal ground, verifying that the coastal specification was actually built, and using dilapidation and defect-liability timing to protect the buyer while the suburb is still under construction.
On a new Alkimos build the inspection is a defect-and-compliance read rather than an age one. The slab and its site classification come first, since extensive earthworks mean imported fill whose depth and compaction the buyer needs confirmed, and the drainage is traced on ground that is often still settling. The coastal specification is checked hard: fixings, flashings, garage doors and hardware should be coastal-grade from handover, and that is where volume builds most often fall short. Roof plumbing, sarking and flashings are read for the workmanship that varies stage to stage, and where the home adjoins live construction a dilapidation record is the sensible protection before the next lot goes up.
None of it is guesswork. Reading the stock above into an inspection, these are the checks the Alkimos pattern pushes to the top of the list:
Alkimos sits on the Quindalup dune system — young calcareous sand, still mobile in places, and thin over the water table near the front. Sand this young has low bearing capacity but very little reactivity, so footing movement is uncommon and drainage problems are not. What the ground gives you here it takes back in the air.
What that means in practice, on a house in Alkimos:
Landform is assigned from the suburb's position on the Swan Coastal Plain rather than from a site soil test. It tells you what to expect, not what you have. A site classification to AS 2870 is a different exercise and a different report.
Alkimos College is the fixed point most people in Alkimos navigate by. Buildings like it are useful to an inspector for a duller reason: they date the area. Whatever era put that up is usually the era that put up the houses around it, and the construction methods of that decade are what we expect to find in the roof.
Eglinton, Butler, Jindalee, Quinns Rocks and Merriwa sit on the same ground as Alkimos, so the footing behaviour and the drainage problems tend to repeat across all of them. If you are comparing houses across those suburbs, you are largely comparing the same site conditions.
Ridgewood is 6.1 km away but sits on the Spearwood dune system. That is the useful thing about this part of Perth: the ground can change inside a few kilometres, and with it what an inspection is looking for.
On site classification: any soil zone quoted for a suburb is indicative, inferred from geography rather than surveyed. A real AS 2870 classification comes from geotechnical work on your actual block and can differ from the one next door. We report what we observe; we do not read your soil class off a map.
The inspection is visual and non-invasive, over the readily accessible areas, reported to AS 4349.1. Our inspectors physically enter the roof space, as long as there is sufficient access. Report within 24 hours of the inspection.
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Flat fee, the same in Alkimos as anywhere: $440 inc. GST for a pre-purchase building inspection, or $616 inc. GST with the timber pest scope added in the same visit. Full price list →
Right on the coast in Wanneroo — the band where coastal salt drives the defects. The fee concentrates on delignified battens, corroded ties and fixings, and the salt staining that starts inside the masonry, with the roof space taking the longest on a tiled roof past its first decade.
Pre-purchase building inspection in Alkimos →
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Yes. Our inspectors physically enter and inspect the roof space, as long as there is sufficient access to do so safely. Where access is restricted, the report says so plainly rather than implying we saw more than we did.
Alkimos is on the coast, inside the band where delignification should be expected in tile battens. On a tiled roof more than about ten years old it is one of the first things we look at.
Within 24 hours of the inspection itself, not 24 hours from booking. On a pre-purchase or pre-settlement job that timing is the whole point, because your leverage disappears once you are committed.
We would rather you checked than took our word for it. These are the bodies that actually hold the records and set the rules:
Tell us about the property and what you need. We'll come back to you with a firm quote and a time.
PERTH