mickyb - who are you using and how much are they charging if you dont mind me asking? please PM me if you want to keep it private.
i'm building in SE Vic (Berwick) soon and will also be building with big M (waiting on final contracts now) so i'd like to look at organising an inspector soon.
I'm using Peter from Finalinspect, he is really good, he keeps in contract with us all the time. We just had our slab poured yesterday and he chased up the Concrete firm and our SS/PM, to find out when the slab was getting poured and we first here from the builder yesterday afternoon to let us know our slab was done.
We did let our builder know that we were using Finalinspect and they didn't have a problem with that.
We was highly recommended to us by a friend who used him a few years back. There are also a few ppl on this fourm who has used him and highly recommended him as well.
He dosen't come cheap we are doing all 5 inspections, but you can get away with 3 inspection if you can't afford all 5.
His cost comes out to be around 1% of our total build cost, his costing us $3.3k for all five inspections and a 12mth inspection.
There are cheaper inspectors out there, but he did come highly recommended to us, this is why we have gone with Peter, and is service to date has be first class.