Why get an Independent Building Inspection When Buying a House

Hi, it’s Tiron from Newcastle Buyers Agent. I’d love you to check out these videos of my referral partners. If you’ve got any questions, please check out the comments below.

I’m Michael Simons and I own Hunter Building Inspections. I do pre-sale and pre-purchase building and pest inspections.

It’s important to get an independent building and pest report because we inspect the property and we make sure that it is completely sound to buy and to proceed with the sale.

pest report

Image Source: Rapid Solutions

The benefits of using a thermal camera to doing the inspection is that we can see what our eyes cannot see. It detects moisture and it detects heat in the walls so we can see if there’s a live termite nest in the cavities. If there’s a heat spot there for example, that will show up as a termite nest. If there’s water ingress it will show up as dark colours. It’s basically, what we cannot see with our eyes, we can see with a thermal camera.

It’s very important to get an up-to-date pest report because the nature of termites is they can enter your home overnight for example. If there’s a nest up to 50m away from the property, they travel subterranean under the ground so they can come within a matter of days, you can have termites in your property.

If someone’s buying a new apartment for example, or a new villa, or new house, I believe they should definitely get a report. Often, we see clients that say, “Oh it’s a brand new home, the builder told us not to worry to get the defect report,” but from our experience – and I’ve been doing this for 13 years now – we definitely think you should get your own independent assessment and defect report because we find a lot of issues. For example, we did a property recently and there was a leak in the pipe where the plumber had not sealed it up properly and it was leaking into the ceiling and we actually picked that up with our thermal camera and we got the builder to rectify that defect.

The client gets from Hunter Building Inspections a full detailed report. Normally, that’s approximately 20 pages and it’s got coloured photos.

I really like this industry because we’re there to bat for the purchaser so we’re on their side unlike a pre-sale or vendor report, sometimes those reports are often commissioned by the real estate agent as opposed to the vendor so it’s not truly a vendor report, it’s an agents report. We feel we’re there to bat for the purchaser, for the client, so we’re on their side.

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