Improving Building Inspections

How AuctionReady can improve the quality of building inspections

People are skimping on building inspections due to cost. We believe this is unnecessary and we can reduce the cost of professional building inspections so this happens less often.

Situation currently

We believe many home buyers (especially inexperienced) are buying houses without having sighted a full professional building inspection.

We believe this is largely due to the high cost. To save money people are either skimping or getting a “builder friend” to have a look through.

This is especially acute when undertaking due diligence before an auction because there is a lot of uncertainty as to whether they will end up with the house. So people are looking to save money where they can.

We don’t know proportions but the chart below gives an example of what it might be:

Relative costs

It is hard to compete with free or box of beer, e.g. builder friend.

But there are many, some would call “cowboys” out there, often part-timers who will do paid building inspections for about half the price of a professional building inspector.

They can do this cheaper because they don’t spend as much time on the building site, their costs are lower because they don’t have professional indemnity insurance, for example. They don’t pay for membership of any industry bodies in the specific area of building inspection.

For many it is very tempting to go for one of these cheaper options, especially if you are so enamoured with the house you can’t imagine there being any major issues.

How AuctionReady can help

We want to reduce the cost of professional inspections so prospective buyers are less tempted to skimp to save money.

We do that by facilitating the sharing of the cost of reports between multiple prospective buyers.

We also only list professional inspectors on our site.

End result

If you are a professional building inspector listed on AuctionReady, you can expect to take business away from the “cowboys”.

Obviously we can’t predict the future but let’s say the share of the market changed to this:

You can also expect to gain more revenue per property inspected because each time we sell an additional copy per property, you get paid a “named copy” fee.

What about vendor reports?

Even if a seller arranges and supplies a pre-sale report prepared by a professional building inspector, building inspectors are human and make mistakes from time to time. This is what professional indemnity insurance is for!

However, the successful buyer who relies on a pre-sale report has no legal recourse because the report is not in their name, meaning they are not the customer.

Some buyers do not trust vendor reports implicitly because the seller has chosen the inspector. Regardless many buyers will buy their own report.

Buying a report through AuctionReady is effectively “buying your own” report because each copy is addressed to the buyer individually. This is obviously not free for the buyer hence additional revenue for the inspector.