Privatised building inspections are a fucking disgrace. I didn’t even realise there were no licencing requirements. I thought they had to be engineers at the very least.
This is fraud, definitely the inspection company and probably the real estate agent should face repercussions for this.
It’s one thing to say “the industry will self regulate”, it’s another for the government to do nothing when the industry doesn’t self regulate.
Certainly in the US home inspectors carry insurance and bonds for this, and would have been responsible for substantial portions of any repairs.
I’ve worked in the Australian housing inspection industry. The good ones have insurance for this. They also, generally, do a good job. Most of them are builders with decades of experience who are no-longer physically fit enough to work on the tools all day.
Some of them can’t get insurance, specifically “Professional Indemnity” insurance which means if they don’t do their job properly the insurance company will pay to fix their mistake. You do not want to work with one of those inspectors.
The real issue is it takes a very long time to properly inspect a house and even longer to properly document your findings with photos/etc. Most people aren’t wiling to pay for that, so they end up hiring somebody cheap who does a half assed job (and can’t get insurance because they do a half assed job).
As someone with building experience myself, I kinda don’t need an inspection… but I still spent the money on a good one because I didn’t want to take the time to go over every aspect with a fine toothed comb and then write up a list of things I should probably fix one day. I’m not an experienced inspector, which means it’ll take me far longer than it takes them even though I probably could find all the issues.
Not sure how new the house she was looking at is, but the quality of construction in Australia is so terrible.
Old mate here cosplays as a SWAT member, but the inspections he does and the stuff he finds is still eye opening as heck:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nN7bItdG-YwIts crazy that people sell themselves as experts in a particular area and yet they don’t even know the standards they should be following. More importantly is when the work is super substandard yet gets handed over and an invoice presented despite it being obviously poor quality work. Not just missing a minor clause in the standard, but being categorically a bad job by any metric.
I suspect the construction quality is so bad because our building warranties are so laughably short compared to the expected life of the home. Iirc most states, the builder is only expected to warranty homes against major problems for up to 6 years, and it’s up to the homeowner to chase down the builder (who may have gone out of business in a meantime).
If your typical family home is meant to last 30 years, the warranty should last 30 years.
and those warranties aren’t transferable, so even if the house is “in warranty” if you sell it the warranty is forfeited and the new buyer is SOL if anything goes wrong due to a construction issue.
Warranties are expensive and housing is already far too expensive in Australia. We don’t need longer warranties.
What we need is workers who actually do their job properly. There’s a distinct lack of those in recent years… my advice is don’t buy or build a new home. Get an old one and pay for it to be renovated. Supervise the renovation work very closely, and avoid letting them do anything too major.
If your typical family home is meant to last 30 years, the warranty should last 30 years.
The expectation is 60 years. 100 if it’s “well built”.
However, that isn’t 100 years with zero maintenance. You will have to repair things… and that’s where the warranty cost becomes an issue.
There will be arguments over what is covered under warranty. Those arguments might be free for the home owner, but they are not free for the builder. Your (or whoever buys the house off you) will complain the gutter rusted out, and the builder will have to hire a scaffold for a few thousand dollars to safely get up to the roof and inspect the gutter, and then tell you it’s because you allowed tree to grow over the roof and didn’t clean the leaves out of the gutter. They will have to take time off their normal paid work to do all of that and they absolutely will charge upfront on the assumption that they’ll be coming back to your house occasionally for the next 30 years.
If you’re wiling to pay… then I’m sure you can find an insurance company who will cover it. Won’t be cheap though.
It’s the cost of materials and labour that is the biggest contributing factor in driving building prices up. Any solution to the shit build problem would drive prices up. More stringent licencing and better enforcement would still drive prices up as it will reduce the labour pool. There’s no two ways around it. We as a society seem to have forgotten that you get what you pay for.
Your work is good from far……but far from good.
That box gutter is… non compliant.
Thankyou for the link. I now love this guy. He’s goofy, he seems to care and he constantly overlays relevant Australian Standard excerpts. Rambles a bit in some videos but that’s the worst I can complain about.
I feel for Erika but dealing with any business especially agents , you should always think of them as scammers. Nobody should be trusted when it comes down to money
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I don’t know what it’s like in Australia, I’m in the USA and just bought a house nowhere near as expensive as hers. I did my due diligence about the entire process, I knew what it takes to be an inspector, I knew not to trust a seller’s inspection. I spent 5 months looking at houses, passing on houses over and over. I found my own inspector that I trusted.
I appreciate that this girl is spreading awareness, articles like this are how this kind of knowledge gets out there, but there’s no excuse for spending almost 1 million dollars without doing at least a basic Google search for “what should I do before buying a house”
But she didn’t buy it. I’m guessing you didn’t read the article.
She felt uneasy about the “pre sale inspection” so got her own which found all those problems and then pulled out of the sale.
She did her due diligence. That’s why she didn’t buy the house. You’re mansplaining.
Shit, I did more due diligence than she was planning when I bought my $2300 motorcycle. And all I did was bring a knowledgeable friend.
If you are spending any amount that you couldn’t comfortably survive losing entirely, make sure you bring in your own expert. Now obviously their level of expertise can vary based on value (I’ll stake 2.5 thousand on my friends word, I wouldn’t stake 100+ thousand without a licensed professional). But unless you’re willing to call yourself knowledgeable enough, always have a second opinion.
And for bonus points, knowledgeable or not, that second opinion is uninvested emotionally. I fell in love with my bike as soon as I heard it fire up, same with my car. But in both cases, I brought someone knowledgeable who didn’t give a fuck if I bought that vehicle. They were able to confirm if I was getting a fair deal without emotion clouding their judgements.
And neither of those cases were risking 6 digits worth of money. Nowhere near the price or due diligence of a house.
Edit: spelling
Not only that but the inspection report on a house is a bargaining tool
My 700 dollar report lead to 10,000 in savings at closing on my house… Worth every penny
Same deal for me, I spent about 550 on an inspection and that let to me being credited 8,500 bucks at closing.
Exactly. You’re unlikely to spend a significant percentage of the total cost on your third party inspection. But that third party inspection will give you information worth way more than they cost. Either the peace of mind that you’re paying a fair price (and doing so fully aware of the issues that you may need to resolve), or encouraging you to negotiate lower/walk away. In all 3 situations you end up leaving the deal more confident that you made the best choice, and usually the inspector earns that money.
