Dilapidation reports for NSW strata buildings: your protection when construction starts next door

What a dilapidation report is

A dilapidation report (also called a property condition survey) is an independent, dated record of a building’s condition at a point in time. A qualified building consultant or engineer documents — in photographs, measurements and written descriptions — every existing crack, defect and settlement mark, inside and out: render, tiling, driveways, retaining walls, basements, common areas.

It isn’t a defect report, and it isn’t a valuation. It’s a baseline. Its one job is to let the owners corporation (the legal name for what most people just call the strata) say with evidence: this crack existed before the excavation started — and this one did not.

Timing is the whole game

Construction-related damage is almost always disputed after the fact. The developer’s engineers will describe your cracking as historic, thermal, or ordinary settlement — and without a pre-construction baseline, that argument is hard to beat, because the burden of showing the damage is new effectively falls on you. Undated phone photos and committee members’ memories rarely carry it.

A dilapidation report taken before works begin flips the position: new damage is anything that appears in the post-construction comparison that isn’t in the baseline. The argument stops being opinion against opinion and becomes a comparison of two dated documents.

Already too late for “before”? Commission one anyway, immediately. A baseline taken mid-works still protects you for everything from that date forward, and an experienced inspector can often distinguish fresh cracking from aged. Late is far better than never.

Who pays — and why your building may already be entitled to a survey

For significant developments, consent authorities in NSW commonly attach conditions to the development consent requiring the developer to obtain dilapidation surveys of neighbouring properties before work starts, and often again at completion. Development application documents are public — most councils publish them through online DA trackers. Two practical moves for the committee:

1. Check the consent conditions for the neighbouring site. If a dilapidation survey condition exists, the developer should be arranging and paying for an inspection of your building. Silence from the developer is a letter — first to them, then to council if ignored — asking when the survey will occur.
2. Demand your copy. If the developer’s consultant inspects your building, the owners corporation should obtain and retain the report. A survey that exists only in the developer’s records protects the developer.

Many schemes also commission their own independent report. The developer’s consultant answers to the developer; a report the owners corporation commissions is evidence it controls — covering the areas it considers vulnerable, at a scope it sets, including lot interiors where owners opt in. For a building already showing movement, that independence can be decisive.

The committee’s checklist, in order

1. Photograph everything visible today — dated images of every known crack and defect, logged by location. Free, and done in an afternoon.
2. Pull the DA and consent conditions for the neighbouring site; look for dilapidation and vibration-monitoring conditions.
3. Write to the developer requesting their pre-construction dilapidation report for your building, or notice of the inspection date.
4. Obtain quotes for an independent survey of the common property, ideally with an option for lot owners to include their lots. Compare scope line by line: dwellings covered, interior access, basement and roof inclusion, and whether a post-construction re-inspection is priced in.
5. Record everything in the scheme’s books — the report, the correspondence, the quotes, the decision. Strata records outlive committees; the value of this exercise is being able to produce the chain years later, under a different committee and possibly a different managing agent.
6. Notify damage as it happens — new cracking gets photographed, dated and reported to the developer in writing at the time, not saved for the end of the project.

The report is only as good as the record

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: a dilapidation report protects nobody if it can’t be found. Construction damage often surfaces years later — at repaint time, when waterproofing fails, when a purchaser’s building inspector asks why the slab has moved. By then the committee has turned over, the managing agent may have changed twice, and the report is in a former secretary’s email archive.

The protection isn’t the inspection; it’s the inspection plus the building’s ability to produce it, date intact, whenever the question comes — along with the quotes that commissioned it and the decision that authorised it, held against the building rather than any person who served that year. StrataTrade makes that chain a by-product of doing the job: scope the inspection once, receive comparable quotes, record the decision, and keep the lot permanently on the building’s record — ready for the day someone asks you to prove the crack wasn’t always there.

This article is general information for NSW strata schemes, not legal or engineering advice. Development consent conditions vary by council and project — always check the specific consent for the site concerned, and seek professional advice for damage claims.