Building Defects and Body Corporates
Recently Felicity phoned me about the new townhouse complex she had moved into as part of her downsizing strategy.
The new place seemed to tick all the boxes and she was very happy until February this year when it started raining. She noticed big sheets of rain spilling over the gutters and she knew that something was not right. She took her concerns to the next body corporate committee meeting and found that she was not alone. In fact, there were many residents much worse off than she was with water penetrating their ceilings. It appeared that there were insufficient down pipes and undersized gutters.
No one knew what to do and no one had taken any action so she rang me to seek a direction.
I suggested two things to do immediately
1. Find the set of construction documents, including the Certificate of Classification* which shows all the approvals, so we could see if the project had been built to specification, and
2. Seek the advice of a hydraulic engineer (which I facilitated) who could calculate the sizes of gutters and down pipes required for the roof area.
On further investigation she found there were no construction documents* held by the Body Corporate which is an extraordinary omission by the building developer. Keeping up to date plans is vitally important.
Apparently, the original developer ran out of money on the project then on sold to another developer who “value managed” the project to completion. Architects are wary of this term. Value management involves cutting things out of the contract to reduce the price. In this case the storm water design was severely compromised.
I referred her to an architect who specializes in built multi residential projects and has hundreds of body corporates as clients. Building quality is a massive problem. You cannot see at the time of purchase what might go wrong with a building and many body corporates don’t have the expertise to deal with building problems, especially complex contractual matters and responsibility chains.
The specialist architect was able to source the documents from Council and advise on the legislative time-frames for building defects (which was soon to expire) The engineer prepared a report which showed the storm water management was grossly under capacity. Given the magnitude of this problem, I recommended that she have a professional defects inspection carried out in an effort to alert the body corporate to possible building faults which could appear in the future.
If I had not shown her the pathway, she may have tried insurance as a pathway to resolution but the underlying problems are never properly addressed this way. In summary, she became a happy client and had a clear pathway to a competent solution to the problems.
*Construction Documents are the complete set of updated plans and specifications of the building project.
*Certificate of Classification is the document which shown all the approvals and is only be released when the necessary inspections and approvals are in place.