What we look for in Pickering Brook, and why it differs from the suburb next door. 33.4 km from the CBD, 38.0 km from the coast, postcode 6076.
Pickering Brook is a small orchard community of under six hundred people, well into the hills and surrounded by Korung National Park and forest. Like nearby Karragullen it is made up primarily of family-run orchards. It was seriously under threat from a bushfire in December 2001.
Surrounded by national park is not a figure of speech here, and it makes bushfire the leading consideration rather than one among several. BAL requirements, ember protection, defendable space, and whether a fire appliance can physically reach a house along a long orchard driveway.
Those are practical questions and the 2001 threat is a reminder that they are not theoretical.
Family-run orchards mean the property extends well beyond the house. Packing sheds. Cool rooms. Machinery sheds. Irrigation infrastructure that may or may not still function. Those structures need assessing in their own right or explicitly excluding, and on a working orchard they frequently represent more value than the dwelling.
Settle in writing which buildings are included before anyone attends. On a working property that is the question people assume rather than confirm.
A community of this size well into the hills means unsewered properties on septic or aerobic systems, bore or tank water, and long private driveways. Distance to services and trades is a practical cost factor.
Named for its brook, so low wet ground runs along the watercourse with sloping orchard land above it.
National park on every side is the governing fact. Korung surrounds this community, and a national park is not cleared, thinned or managed to suit a landholder. The habitat is permanent and it presses on every boundary.
Inside that boundary sits irrigated orchard ground, damp through summer by design.
So the pressure arrives from outside and the conditions that sustain it are maintained inside. That combination is what makes a small orchard community in a national park a genuinely demanding pest inspection rather than a routine one.
The brook adds moisture on the low ground, and effluent systems keep a patch damp near each dwelling.
On hills houses the subfloor comes first where floors are timber. Access varies with the slope.
An orchard property is a half-day job before travel is counted. Sheds, cool rooms, irrigation, dwelling, services. Running that circuit twice, on separate days, for two reports built from the same observations, is not a serious proposal. Reported under AS 4349.1 and AS 4349.3.
On a working orchard, buyers usually want the cool rooms and packing infrastructure assessed as specific items. They are commercial structures with commercial consequences if they fail.
Bushfire compliance is worth considering alongside the inspection rather than separately. In a community surrounded by national park the two conversations belong together.
Ask about access as well as construction, because the two are separate questions. A long orchard driveway that a fire truck cannot use is a genuine consideration, and it is not something a building inspection covers on its own.
Pickering Brook sits on the laterite foothills of the Darling Scarp — lateritic gravel and clay over granite, with rock close to the surface and real slope. Slope is the defining feature. Cut and fill, split levels, and retaining walls are normal here rather than exceptional, and retaining is where the money goes wrong. Rock near the surface also means surface water runs rather than soaks.
What that means in practice, on a house in Pickering Brook:
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.
Pickering Brook National Park is the fixed point most people in Pickering Brook 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.
Roleystone, Sawyers Valley, Bickley, Carmel, Walliston and Martin sit on the same ground as Pickering Brook, 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.
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 Pickering Brook 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 →
Well inland at 38.0 km from the coast, out in Kalamunda, the inland setting changes what the fee buys in Pickering Brook: footing and slab movement, drainage and the reactive soils of the South East belt come first, and coastal delignification is a lower priority away from the arterial corridors.
Pre-purchase building inspection in Pickering Brook →
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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.
At 38.0 km inland, Pickering Brook carries lower coastal-salt exposure, so delignification is not the first thing we would expect. It remains possible near heavy arterial corridors or industrial emissions.
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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