Building Inspectors

Did you nominate your own surveyor or one recommended by builder?

Hi There - We have our own Surveyor (do you mean for the land?) C

Cheers

Have a inspector through your whole build I have and his the best

I was referring to building surveyor.
The build permit needs to be obtained from a surveyor. This surveyor could be a council surveyor (this in other words known as council permit) or a Private Building Surveyor (PBS) who is a practicing surveyor. These are different from inspectors.

A surveyor's permit is required to start a building construction. The builder obtains permit from a surveyor. He would obtain from a council surveyor or a PBS.

All the volume builders do recommend (indirectly entice you) to appoint their preferred surveyor as the surveyor needs to verify at each checkpoint to ensure that the building construction is done as per the legislated requirements. Their preferred surveyor gives nod to everything, in some cases they don't even check at all.

So do your research and appoint your own surveyor who has got a reputation for ensuring the compliance.
An inspector is entirely different. You may appoint a separate independent Inspector at each stage to identify the defects. These defects are expected to be rectified, and in reality not all the builders are good at rectification.

Theres nothing wrong with having your own inspector alongside the one appointed by the builder. We used Houspect and found them really good (as did our site supervisor).

Our house got wrapped/plastered before bricks started. Its called a reverse build and pretty common. Keeps things moving inside while they wait for bricklayers to be available.

We let our build admin person and site supervisor know. They don't generally need to know this early.

The building company will build to the contract and invoice you for the stages. They have no obligation to consider the building inspectors reports, and probably won’t. If your inspector finds defects you will need to follow the notification and dispute process specified in the contract. Be wary of verbal assurances from site supervisors that will never happen! Do not think the builder will happily fix everything in the inspection report before PCI.

What does it cost you in time and money to "win" if the builder is in breach?

In my case the inspector and myself identified many defects which were reported to the builder. The builder ignored the report and sped up construction to claim the fixing stage complete and send their invoice with 5 day payment terms. I disputed this due to the defects. After all their verbal assurances that things would be fixed were not backed up by action and therefore not accepted by me they then slowed down. They even breached a government legal order. The reason they slowed down was to pressure me financially to accept the defective work. Like many other customers have had to. In the end the build was about 45 weeks delayed which cost me over $85,000 in rent, interest and legal fees. Other customers are living in homes with similar defects either knowingly or unaware. Building inspectiors do a good job however the ‘standard’ HIA contract that Metricon uses does not provide customers with protection when defects are identified. A liquidated damages amount of $30 per working day for delays allows Metricon to pressure customers to accept defective work when the actual costs of delays can be $250 per calendar day in rent and interest etc. Something to consider when assessing a Metricon contract. Do you want to rely on their good will to do the right thing? The state government agencies are not effective and legal action for breaches is very expensive. Check the various social media forums about this topic and Metricons recent behaviours and take care!