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Small Development Guide - case study

Paul Corn is the director of a company that specialises in inspections of newly constructed properties. Corn is a former builder with 35 years experience in the industry and says this has given him the expertise to uncover defects. And he has some horror stories.

He says unless you get a licensed builder to inspect your project, you may miss out on major defects. Corn and his team use a system where they place round dots around the property where there are defects. There's also a comprehensive report detailing what needs to be rectified.

"So anyone can walk into the property and immediately see what's wrong," he says. "The builder can see by the dots what needs to be done and organise tradies to come back and fix it. So it might say in bedroom three there's something wrong with the light switch and he'll need to get an electrician in. It makes it easy for the builder and stress free for the client."

Corn says they're "picky little buggers" but stay within the guidelines and only pinpoint problems.

In one property, the builder complained about the big amount of dots that had been placed in the house.

"So I said to him to walk around the house and pull off any dot that shouldn't be there," he says. "And he couldn't because everywhere there was a dot, there was a problem."

A home that had been built for a Sydney man as an investment near Beenleigh was one of the worst Corn had ever seen. When inspecting the home in December 2005, he was shocked at how bad it was. The builder asked for some leniency because he said, "it's only an investment house - the owner will never see it."

Corn says he got three-quarters of the way through the house and had to stop because there was too much wrong with the building.

"I rang the owner in Sydney and told them not to make the final payment and that really the house should be pulled down," he says.

In between Christmas and New Year, Corn organised a meeting on site with the builder, the owner and a solicitor specialising in building disputes.

"In the end we got the builder to buy the house back off the owner," he says. "When you walked in the front door, you started to lean toward the left because the floor was about 35 millimetres out of level. There wasn't a square or plumb wall anywhere in the house, the tiling was atrocious, the kitchen was atrocious, every window sill had a twist in it and the front door frame was about 45 millimetres out of line. The down pipes weren't plumbed and ran backwards."

More than two years later the house is still for sale.

Another Sydney investor who was having an investment home built in Brisbane rang him about eight months after that shocking inspection. He unfortunately had employed the same builder.

"He was supposed to have a timber fence and instead the builder used second hand roofing sheets," Corn says. "When he asked the builder why he had a metal fence instead of a timber one, he told him that if he got the timber delivered it would only get stolen. It had holes in the sheets from when they had been used before."

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