What we look for in Crawley, and why it differs from the suburb next door. 5.8 km from the CBD, 4.3 km from the coast, postcode 6009.
Crawley is barely a square kilometre and a half, and most of it is the University of Western Australia. That single fact shapes nearly everything about buying property here.
A large share of the housing is student and university related accommodation, colleges and apartments, so most inspections in Crawley are strata. Buying here generally means buying into a building rather than onto a block, and the priorities change accordingly. Concrete structure. Waterproofing membranes. Fire and acoustic separation between dwellings. The condition of common property. Then there is the accelerated wear that high turnover tenancy produces, which shows up first in wet areas and floor coverings.
Colleges and purpose built student accommodation are a category of their own. They run at capacity for most of the year, get cleaned hard between tenancies, and accumulate wear far faster than an owner occupied building of the same age. Judge them on condition rather than on the year they were built.
Read the strata records. What the scheme has spent and what it has put off will reach you through levies regardless of which apartment the defect sits above.
The riverfront brings something unusual. Crawley's shoreline is lined with boatsheds and jetties, many of them old timber structures standing in water. Where one comes with a property it needs assessing in its own right. Timber condition and marine borer. The state of piles and footings below the waterline. Whether the structure is approved at all, and whether anyone will insure it. Buyers tend to assume these are fine because they look charming.
Apartment buildings on modern slabs sit at the lower end of termite risk. The exposure here is different and it is worth being specific about it.
Landscaping around ground floor lots, planter boxes and podium gardens above car parks keep soil damp against structure. Timber decking and pergolas in courtyards give colonies somewhere to establish. On the low riverside land at Matilda Bay and Pelican Point the water table is high and estuarine damp is constant, which raises pressure on anything at ground level.
Boatsheds are a separate matter again. Timber standing in or over water faces marine borer and fungal decay rather than subterranean termites, and a timber pest inspection covers that. Where a shed forms part of the sale it should be inspected and reported, not mentioned in passing.
For a strata lot with a courtyard, or a property with a river structure attached, the combined inspection gets everything covered in one visit. The building side looks at concrete, membranes and common property while the timber pest side covers landscaping, decking and any river timber. Reported under AS 4349.1 and AS 4349.3, with one set of access arrangements through the strata manager or the college.
Apartment and strata inspections dominate, including for investors buying student accommodation sight unseen. Practical completion inspections apply to new apartment stock, and pre-settlement inspections to everything else.
Dilapidation reports come up where campus or apartment construction is happening nearby. We also do expert witness reports, which in strata contexts usually concern water ingress and who is responsible for fixing it.
Crawley sits on the Spearwood dune system — residual yellow and grey sand over a Tamala Limestone core, with the rock often close to the surface. Limestone near the surface makes for stable footings and expensive excavation. Where the rock is shallow, older houses often sit directly on limestone footings, and those are the ones to look at for rising damp and salt damp at the base of the wall.
What that means in practice, on a house in Crawley:
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.
Crawley Park and Royal Perth Yacht Club are the fixed points in Crawley. They matter to an inspection for an unromantic reason: they date the surrounding stock. The decade that built them is usually the decade that built the houses around them, and that decade decides what is in the roof, what is in the walls, and what the wiring looks like.
Nedlands, Dalkeith, Shenton Park and Daglish sit on the same ground as Crawley, 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.
Claremont is 3.1 km away but sits on the Quindalup dune system; Mount Claremont is 3.3 km away but sits on the Quindalup 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 Crawley 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 →
At 4.3 km from the water, Crawley sits inside the coastal-salt band, in postcode 6009, the fee here is spent chasing salt. Chemical delignification in the tile battens, wall ties rusting inside the cavity, fixings going to lace where the sea air reaches them — on an older tiled roof the roof space is where most of the inspection time lands.
Pre-purchase building inspection in Crawley →
Building and pest inspection in Crawley →
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.
Crawley is 4.3 km from 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.
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