The guideFound a home2 min read
Building, pest and strata reports
What each report covers, what none of them cover, and how to use a bad one to renegotiate instead of walking away.
By Paddy Carroll · Founder, HomePlanner
You are about to spend several hundred thousand dollars on the basis of two twenty-minute visits. The reports are how you find out what you actually agreed to buy. They are also the cheapest leverage in the entire purchase, and most buyers treat them as a formality to get past.
Three different reports
Building
The structure and what's attached to it.
- What it looks at
- Structure, roof, walls, floors, wet areas, drainage, obvious defects.
- What it misses
- Anything behind a wall or under a floor. It is a visual inspection, not a demolition.
- Roughly
- $450
- When it matters most
- Anything built before the 1990s, or anything recently repainted.
Pest
Things living in it.
- What it looks at
- Termites, borers, and conditions that invite them — damp, timber in ground contact.
- What it misses
- Damage that is fully concealed, and any colony that isn't active today.
- Roughly
- $400, or about $550 combined
- When it matters most
- Timber construction, anywhere warm and wet, any sign of past treatment.
Strata
The finances of the building you're joining.
- What it looks at
- Admin and sinking funds, insurance, the minutes, disputes, planned works.
- What it misses
- The physical condition of the building — that's still the building report's job.
- Roughly
- $400
- When it matters most
- Every unit and townhouse, without exception.
The strata report is the one people skim
If you are buying a unit or a townhouse you are not just buying a home, you are buying a share of a small company with its own finances, its own politics and its own liabilities. The report is the accounts. Four things to look at:
- 1The sinking fund. Money set aside for major works — roof, lifts, waterproofing, render. A thin sinking fund in an ageing building means a special levy is coming, and it will land on whoever owns the lot when it does.
- 2The administration fund. Day-to-day running. Persistently short means quarterly levies are about to rise.
- 3Three to five years of minutes. Read them. Recurring water ingress, a dispute with a builder, an argument about cladding, a defect the committee has been discussing since 2022 — it is all there in plain language.
- 4What the insurance actually covers. Not whether a policy exists. Exclusions for flood, for defective work, for particular claddings are the ones that matter.
The report came back bad. Now what?
A bad report is not automatically a reason to walk. It is a priced list of things you now know and the vendor has to acknowledge. Three moves, in rough order of how often they are the right one:
- 01
Renegotiate the price
Get one or two quotes for the work and take them back. A specific number from a tradesperson is far harder to wave away than 'the report found some issues'. Vendors who have already committed elsewhere frequently move.
- 02
Ask for the work, or a retention
Rectification before settlement, or an agreed amount held back at settlement until it's done. Useful where the fix is urgent and you'd rather not manage it.
- 03
Walk
Right when the finding is structural, when the cost is genuinely unknowable, or when the vendor won't engage. This is what the condition or the cooling-off period was for. Using it is not a failure; it is the thing working.
Before you move on
- Building and pest booked the day your offer was accepted
- Strata report read, including the sinking fund and three years of minutes
- Quotes obtained for anything the report flagged
- You know your cooling-off end date and the report arrives before it