Quick answer: Should I get a building inspection on a new home? Yes. Victorian regulations require your building surveyor to inspect a new house as few as three times across the entire build, and Practice Note BP-09 states that an occupancy permit "is not evidence that the building, or part of a building to which it applies, complies with this Act or the Regulations." A building inspection is the only assessment of your home that is carried out for you, rather than for the permit.
Table of Contents
Key Takeaways:
- Victorian regulations set the mandatory notification stages for a new house, and for a standard home that can mean as few as three surveyor inspections across the whole build.
- An occupancy permit confirms a building is suitable for occupation. The regulator’s own practice note says it is not evidence of compliance with the Building Act.
- Audits of new multi-residential buildings found 74% of Victorian buildings carried at least one defect.
- From 1 July 2026, you can claim under your home warranty while your builder is still trading, with cover up to $400,000.
- Research on Melbourne sales found properties carrying a known unrepaired defect sold for around 9% less than comparable homes.
- Stage and handover inspections across Melbourne and Geelong range from $425 to $540, against a metropolitan median house price above $1 million.
The Short Answer for Anyone Buying or Building in Victoria
Get the inspection. The reason has nothing to do with assuming your builder is careless. It comes down to who each person on your project is working for.
Your building surveyor is engaged for the permit. Your builder assesses their own work. Your lender releases money against a progress claim. None of those people writes you a report you can act on, and none of them is looking at the things you will notice in year two.
For most home buyers, this is the biggest purchase they will ever make, and it is the only one they sign for without an independent assessment of what they are getting.
There is one situation where skipping it holds up. If you are buying a small, simple, fully completed home, with a long settlement and a builder who is registered, solvent, and still within the warranty window, your exposure is genuinely lower. Even then you are betting on a builder staying in business long enough to fix whatever turns up.
Everyone else is better off spending a few hundred dollars to find out what they own.
How Many Times Your Building Surveyor Inspects a New Home
This is the part most buyers have wrong, and it is worth getting precise about.
The Mandatory Notification Stages Under Victorian Regulations
Regulation 167 of the Building Regulations 2018 prescribes the stages at which a builder must notify the relevant building surveyor and the surveyor must inspect. For a new building, those stages are before placing a footing, before pouring a specified in situ reinforced concrete member, completion of framework, an additional inspection required by Regulation 172, and final on completion of all building work.
Two of those five drop away on a normal house. Regulation 172 covers additional inspections for Class 2, 3, 4, 9a, and 9c buildings, which include apartments and commercial work rather than detached homes. The reinforced concrete stage only applies where the surveyor has specified such a member in the permit. Regulation 171 also lets the surveyor determine which stages apply to your particular job.
Run that through for a conventional house, and you are left with three. Footing. Frame. Final.
Three visits across a build that takes nine to eighteen months. That is the legal floor, and for most homes in Melbourne’s growth corridors it is also the ceiling.
What Your Surveyor Is Checking Against
The Building and Plumbing Commission describes a mandatory inspection as an assessment of “overall compliance of the building work with the Act, Regulations and building permit up to that point in time.”
The benchmark is the permit, the Act, the Regulations and the National Construction Code. That is a compliance test. It is a real and useful one, and it is a different question from whether the waterproofing membrane was applied the way the manufacturer specifies.
The same practice note confirms a surveyor cannot carry out a mandatory inspection by relying on photographs, drone footage, declarations or reports. They have to attend. That requirement exists because the work needs eyes on it, which is the same reason an independent inspection earns its fee at the stages the surveyor never attends.
Your local council sits further back again. Council inspections address planning permits, drainage connections, asset protection, and pool registration rather than the quality of the home. Where a private surveyor issued your permit, the council has no inspection role in the build at all. Waiting for the council to catch poor workmanship is waiting for something that was never part of the job.
Why an Occupancy Permit Is Not What Buyers Think It Is
Here is the sentence that surprises people. Practice NoteBP-09, issued by the Victorian regulator, sets out the effect of section 46 of the Building Act 1993 in plain terms. An occupancy permit is evidence that the building is suitable for occupation. It “is not evidence that the building, or part of a building to which it applies, complies with this Act or the Regulations.”
The regulator says its final document does not certify legal compliance. Suitable for occupation is a habitability test. Compliance is a separate question, and the permit does not answer it.
Anyone treating an occupancy permit as a clean bill of health is reading more into it than the government puts there. Understanding how an inspection runs alongside that permit is what closes the gap.
What Changed in Victoria on 1 July 2026
Most advice online about Victorian building protections is now out of date. Three things moved.
Home Warranty Pays While Your Builder Is Still Trading
The old domestic building insurance scheme was last resort cover. It paid out up to $300,000 if your builder died, disappeared, or became insolvent, on contracts over $16,000. If your builder was still in business and simply refusing to fix something, the policy did nothing for you.
The First Resort Home Warranty Scheme applies to eligible contracts signed on or after 1 July 2026. Cover runs to $400,000 per home on contracts valued over $20,000. Claims are no longer limited to death, disappearance or insolvency. As the Building and Plumbing Commission puts it, you may be able to claim where your builder is unable or unwilling to complete or fix eligible work.
Cover runs six years for major defects and two years for other defects and non-compliant work, measured from completion. The scheme applies to residential buildings of three storeys or less, and it does not protect owners who used an unregistered builder for work that required a registered one.
Rectification Orders Now Reach Back Ten Years
The Commission can issue a rectification order directing a builder, subcontractor or developer to fix or complete building work. That power runs during construction and for up to ten years after the certificate of final inspection, occupancy permit or practical completion date.
This is a regulator power rather than a claim you make, so it sits alongside your warranty rather than replacing it.
The Body You Deal With Has a New Name and Wider Powers
The Building and Plumbing Commission started on 1 July 2025. It absorbed the Victorian Building Authority, Domestic Building Dispute Resolution Victoria, and the domestic building insurance functions previously run by VMIA.
If a website tells you to contact the VBA or lodge a dispute with DBDRV, that content predates the change. The Commission now registers practitioners, runs the conciliation service, administers home warranty and issues rectification orders.
Three Separate Clocks Run on a New Home in Victoria
This is where consumer advice gets muddled, and the confusion costs people real money. Your protections are not one period. They are four; they start on different dates, and they expire independently.
|
Protection |
Runs for |
Starts from |
|
Implied warranties under the Domestic Building Contracts Act |
No fixed expiry, and they pass to later owners |
The contract |
|
Home warranty cover |
6 years major defects, 2 years other defects |
Completion of the work |
|
Rectification order power |
10 years |
Practical completion or occupancy permit |
|
Right to bring a building action under the Building Act |
10 years |
Issue of the occupancy permit |
Read the last row again. The ten-year long stop on bringing a building action runs from the date the occupancy permit was issued. Not from your settlement. Not from the day the crack appeared.
Buy a five-year-old house in Point Cook, and you have roughly five years left on that clock, not ten. Buy one that is nine years old, and you have months.
A defect can breach your builder’s warranty, sit outside your two-year insurance window, and still fall inside the ten-year long stop, all at the same time. Knowing which clock applies to your problem decides whether you have a claim or a story.
How Often Newly Built Homes Carry Defects
Analysis of 212 building audit reports identified 3,227 defects, an average of fourteen per building. Across the sample, 85% of new multi-residential buildings had at least one defect. The Victorian figure was 74%, with an average of 11 defects per building.
The defects clustered in predictable places. Cladding accounted for more than 40%, followed by fire protection, waterproofing, roof and rainwater disposal, and structural items.
One finding from a Victorian government agency is worth sitting with. Cladding Safety Victoria was established to address combustible cladding, and it reports that half the buildings it reviewed had defects unrelated to cladding. An agency opened those buildings looking for one problem and found others along the way.
The most common issues that turn up in a building inspection report are those tied to water. Water ingress accounts for more reported problems than any other issue in a new build. Waterproofing failures in wet areas and on balconies, roof drainage that does not fall the right way, and water entering at junctions where two materials meet.
Structural problems show up less often, and they cost far more when they do. Foundation movement on reactive soils, cracking that widens over a season, and frames that were never braced to the engineering. These are the major problems worth paying somebody to look for, because they rarely announce themselves at first glance.
It helps to separate the categories before you panic about a long list. Cosmetic improvements are paint coverage, minor scuffs and finish items. Minor defects are things that fall short of building standards without threatening the home. Major structural defects go to the integrity of the building. All three belong in the report. Only one of them should hold up a payment.
How Victoria Compares With Other States
Victoria is not unusual in leaving independent inspections to the owner, and the defect problem is national.
Building Commission NSW surveys of strata buildings in New South Wales have consistently found more than half carrying serious defects, with waterproofing and fire safety systems at the top of the list. Queensland takes a different approach to practitioners: the Queensland Building and Construction Commission licenses building inspectors and sets out what a report must contain. South Australia and Western Australia leave more of it to the market again.
The point for a Victorian owner is simple. No state relies on regulatory inspections to deliver build quality, because that was never what they were designed to do.
What an Unrepaired Defect Does to Your Property Value
Most articles on this topic stop at repair cost. The larger number indicates how the defect affects the asset.
Research published in Urban Studies examined Melbourne property sales and found that homes with combustible cladding sold for approximately 9% less than comparable properties without it. Affected properties also traded less often, which is the quieter problem. A discount only hurts when you sell. Reduced saleability hurts when you need to.
The detail that makes the finding useful is the rent comparison. Rents on the same properties fell only around 3%. Tenants were not fleeing. Buyers were pricing in who pays to fix it.
Melbourne’s median house price sits at $1,041,205 as at the June quarter 2026. A 9% discount on that median is more than $93,000. Set that against an inspection fee in the hundreds and the arithmetic does the arguing for you.
Two honest caveats belong here. That study covered combustible cladding on apartments, and its sales data ends in 2019. No equivalent study exists for a failed shower membrane in a detached house, so this is the closest available proxy rather than a direct measurement. What it does establish is that the market prices unrepaired defects, and it prices them in tens of thousands.
Buying a Newly Built Home You Did Not Build
Plenty of people reading this never watched the slab go down. You are buying a completed spec home, a display home, or a near-new property from its first owner. Nothing about the build was under your supervision.
A pre-purchase building inspection matters more here, not less. You have no photographs from frame stage, no record of what was queried during construction, and no relationship with the site supervisor. The property’s condition on the day you inspect is all you have to go on.
Prospective buyers also tend to relax on a new property in a way they never would on an established one. Existing homes get scrutinised. Buyers look for rising damp, tired wiring and roof age, and they price accordingly. A home built two years ago gets a walkthrough and an assumption. The defect data says the assumption is misplaced.
Pre-purchase inspections on near-new homes are worth timing carefully. Any remaining home warranty cover attaches to the work rather than to you personally, and the ten-year right to bring a building action passes to later owners. Knowing exactly how much of each period remains changes what a defect is worth at the negotiating table and can affect the purchase price.
When to Book a Stage Inspection or a Practical Completion Inspection
Timing decides how much an inspection is worth. Three moments matter more than the rest.
- During construction. Between your surveyor’s footing visit and their frame visit, nobody independent is looking at the work. At lock-up stage, the building envelope closes, and the junctions vanish behind linings. Booking independent stage inspections at frame stage and lock-up puts someone on site while the evidence is still visible.
- Before you sign at handover. Practical completion is the last point where you hold leverage, because the final payment has not cleared. A defect raised before you accept the home is your builder’s problem. The same defect raised a fortnight later is a request. This is why handover and completion inspections sit before the signature rather than after it.
- Before your two-year cover closes. The non-structural window under home warranty runs two years from completion. Almost nobody diarises it. A warranty inspection before expiry is the last inexpensive opportunity to have minor defects documented while they are still covered.
What Building Inspectors Look For in a New Home
The checklist for a new build differs from the one used on an established house. Nobody is looking for rising damp in a home that was a paddock two years ago. The risks sit elsewhere.
Waterproofing to Wet Areas and Balconies
This is where the Victorian regulator has been concentrating. A balcony inspection blitz across more than 120 apartment buildings under construction found missing or insufficient overflow provisions, membrane bubbling, insufficient membrane thickness, water pooling due to improper floor gradients, and upstand heights that did not comply.
Those same failures appear in houses. A shower membrane that stops short of the required height will not leak on handover day. It leaks in year three, into a wall cavity, and by then the tiles have to come off. Knowing how to spot leaks in wet areas early is the difference between a silicone bead and a bathroom rebuild.
Structural Integrity and Major Structural Defects
Footings, frame, bracing, tie downs and lintels. An inspector is checking these against the approved plans and the engineering rather than against how the finished room looks.
Structural elements are also the items with the longest tail. Major structural defects carry six years of home warranty cover and up to ten years under the Building Act, so the record of when a defect first appeared matters as much as the defect itself.
Electrical Systems, Safety Switches and Compliance Items
Safety switches, circuit labelling, smoke alarm placement and the final electrical inspection sign-off. These are small items with serious consequences, and they are easy to miss on a walkthrough because nothing about them is visible.
Electrical problems on a new build are rarely dramatic. An unlabelled board, a switchboard without the safety switches required by the standard, or a smoke alarm too close to a ceiling fan. They read as trivia until they become safety hazards, which is why they belong on a written list rather than in a verbal aside from a site supervisor.
Do New Builds Need Pest Cover
The honest answer is narrower than most people expect. A new home does not have decades of termite activity behind it. What it has is a termite management system installed during construction and then worked around by every trade that followed.
That is what building and pest inspections check on new construction. Whether the barrier is intact, whether inspection zones are clear, and whether site conditions around the slab have compromised the system since it went in. Combined bookings usually come back as two reports, one covering the building and one covering timber pests, because they are assessed against different Australian Standards.
Termite activity in a home this young is uncommon. A defeated barrier in a home this young is not.
Pool and Spa Barrier Compliance and Its Deadlines
If your new home includes a pool or spa, Victoria imposes obligations with hard dates. You must register with your council within 30 days of the occupancy permit or certificate of final inspection. A compliance certificate must be lodged every 4 years, and it is only valid for 30 days after issuance.
The penalties are not nominal. Failing to maintain a barrier that restricts access carries a 50 penalty unit fine, which works out to around $10,455 at current rates. Getting pool barrier compliance confirmed at handover avoids discovering the problem when the certificate falls due.
A broader view of what inspectors look for covers the accessible areas of the property in the same sequence an inspector walks it.
What a Building Inspection Costs in Melbourne and Geelong
National averages are close to useless here, because they blend Sydney apartments with regional Queensland. Property size and complexity drive the fee more than anything else. These figures come from published rate cards of Victorian inspection firms, so treat them as commercial pricing rather than official data.
|
Inspection type |
Melbourne and Geelong range |
|
Stage inspection during construction |
$425 to $465 plus GST |
|
Practical completion or handover inspection |
$450 to $525 plus GST |
|
Standard three to four bedroom house |
$400 to $700 |
|
Apartment or unit |
$280 to $500 |
|
Large, double storey or complex home |
$830 and up |
Now the other side of the ledger. A cost-benefit analysis prepared for the Australian Building Codes Board put balcony and podium waterproofing rectification at approximately $24,000 per defect, basement waterproofing at around $8,300 per apartment, and roof waterproofing at between $550 and $6,900.
Those repair figures are also moving. The Cordell Construction Cost Index shows building costs up 29.5% over five years. A defect quoted at $12,000 in 2021 is not a $12,000 job today.
Consumer Affairs Victoria puts the comparison plainly in its own guidance, describing the fee for a professional inspection service as small compared with the cost of buying a property that needs extensive unforeseen repairs. The same page carries a warning worth repeating. Be wary of any property inspection report offered by the agent or the seller, because getting your own report is the only way to know it is independent.
A closer look at inspection costs in Melbourne breaks the pricing down by property type and location.
What to Do With Your Written Building Inspection Report
A report only pays for itself if you use it. Four steps turn a document into an outcome.
- Serve the defect list before you accept. At handover, the defect report goes to your builder in writing before you sign anything. Photographs, locations and the standard each item breaches. A dated written building inspection report settles most arguments before they start by removing the question of when the problem appeared.
- Agree the rectification and book the re-inspection. Have your inspector confirm the defects rectified were actually rectified, rather than taking a supervisor’s word for it. Ask whether re-inspection is included when you book, because policies differ between firms.
- Use the free conciliation service. The Commission runs the conciliation service that was formerly known as DBDRV. It is free and the gateway to the tribunal. VCAT will generally not hear a domestic building dispute unless you hold a certificate of conciliation or an equivalent document.
- Know the odds before you escalate. The Victorian Auditor-General found that of disputes reaching conciliation, 52% were fully resolved and 7% partially resolved. Twelve per cent of completed cases went on to VCAT. Most disputes end without a tribunal, and those that settle early tend to have documentation behind them.
How to Find a Qualified Inspector in Victoria
Anyone can print a business card. The register is free, so use it.
The Commission maintains a public register at bpc.vic.gov.au/check, searchable by name, business name, registration number or type of work. It returns registration status, the work a practitioner is permitted to carry out, and any conditions or limits. A separate compliance and enforcement register lists disciplinary action, prosecutions, suspensions and cancellations.
Consumer Affairs Victoria advises using an inspection service with full professional indemnity insurance, which protects you if an inspection misses a problem that must be fixed. Ask about it directly rather than assuming it is in place.
Then ask what you are actually buying. A standard building inspection covers the accessible areas of the property against Australian Standards, and it should produce a detailed assessment rather than a checklist with ticks. Request a sample professional building inspection report before you book. You want to see whether the findings reference the National Construction Code and the relevant standard, or describe things loosely and leave your builder room to argue.
Two more worth raising. Ask what happens if the builder blocks site access, because an independent inspector who has handled that before will approach it differently. And ask how major and minor items are separated in the building report, since that separation is what makes the document usable as quality assurance rather than a list of complaints
Book Your Building Inspection Before You Sign at Handover
Three surveyor visits across a build worth several hundred thousand dollars are what the law requires. It is a floor, and it was never designed to tell you whether your home was built well.
Ripple Building Inspections works across Melbourne metropolitan suburbs, Geelong, the Bellarine and the Surf Coast. You get a written report with photographs, referenced against the National Construction Code and the relevant Australian Standards, in language your builder can act on.
Book the stage closest to you, and get it in writing while it still matters.
FAQs about Building Inspection Reports
Under AS 4349.1-2007 it must include the inspector’s details, the inspection date, the property address, prevailing conditions, all major defects, a general assessment of minor defects, any safety hazards, the limitations encountered, recommendations for specialist inspection, and a conclusion on overall condition.
Most companies deliver within 24 hours of the completed inspection, though how long on-site inspections take depends on the house’s size and age. Ask before you book, because on a private sale with a three-day cooling-off window, a report arriving on day three is close to useless.
