When Erika offered $700k for a home, she didn't know it was 'better suited to demolition'
When Erika offered $700k for a home, she didn't know it was 'better suited to demolition'
Erika Vlasic received two reports about a home she wanted to buy. She said one came back with "no big issues", the other found the property was suited to "demolition".
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.
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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.