What we look for in Willagee, and why it differs from the suburb next door. 12.5 km from the CBD, 3.9 km from the coast, postcode 6156.
Willagee was built as State Housing Commission stock and it shows in the fabric. What has happened since is that its position, between Fremantle and Melville on generous lots, has driven sustained renovation and subdivision, so the suburb now holds two quite different kinds of property.
Original Commission housing from the 1950s and 60s is modest and standardised. Now seventy years old. Aged services. Wet area fabric long past what it was built for. Asbestos era materials likely wherever renovation has not reached, which on stock of this age is a great deal of it.
Alongside that sit heavily renovated examples and new builds on subdivided lots. Establishing which you are looking at is the first task, because the two share a street and nothing else.
On a subdivided lot, read the easements. Read the shared arrangements too. Driveways and drainage outlast owners, as do party walls, and they involve a neighbour who will be there long after the agent has moved on.
Renovated Commission houses need a specific kind of attention. Where a modest original structure has been substantially altered, the junction between old work and new is where problems collect, and the quality of that work varies enormously depending on who did it and when.
Ask what was approved rather than relying on a floor plan. Plans get redrawn.
Set back from the coast, salt reaches here moderately rather than fully, so delignification is a fair check without leading the report.
Renovation is what distinguishes Willagee from other Commission suburbs, and it cuts both ways for a pest inspection.
A well-renovated house has often had its wet areas rebuilt, its plumbing replaced and its subfloor opened up, which removes several of the conditions a colony depends on. A partially renovated one has new linings over old problems, and that is worse than either extreme.
Underneath, seventy years of garden supplies buried timber, old stumps and beds banked against wall bases. Whatever protection went in at construction stopped working decades ago.
On a renovated house, additions create junctions that neither side can be fully inspected from, and a concealed leak inside recently finished work can run for a long time before anything shows.
Where a house has been altered, both reports depend on first working out what it is and where the old work meets the new. Making that judgement once produces a coherent account rather than two partial ones. Reported under AS 4349.1 and AS 4349.3.
On any renovated Commission house, ask for the approval history. On this stock the paperwork is missing more often than it is present and the gap transfers at settlement.
Subdivision drives most of the other work. A condition record for the original dwelling before excavation starts behind it, staged inspections during the build, and a handover check when the new house is finished.
On a renovated Commission house, the useful question is who did the work. A licensed builder and a handy owner produce different results, and the difference shows up in the junctions rather than the finishes.
Willagee 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 Willagee:
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.
Willagee Park is the fixed point most people in Willagee 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.
O'Connor, Melville, Palmyra, Myaree, Kardinya and Samson sit on the same ground as Willagee, 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 Willagee 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 3.9 km from the water, Willagee sits inside the coastal-salt band, and salt does the damage this close to the water. The flat fee buys a hard look at the tile battens for delignification, at the wall ties and metal fixings for corrosion, and at the rust bleed through render that looks cosmetic and is not. The tiled-roof void is the priority.
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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.
Willagee is 3.9 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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