Dilapidation reports: how a body corporate protects itself when construction starts next door

What a dilapidation report actually is

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

It is not a defect report and it is not an insurance valuation. It is a baseline. Its entire job is to let you say, with evidence: this crack existed before the excavation started — and this one did not.

Why the timing is everything

Damage from nearby construction — vibration from piling and rock-breaking, ground movement from excavation and dewatering, heavy vehicle traffic — is almost always argued about after the fact. The builder’s engineers will say your cracks are old, thermal, or ordinary settlement. Without a pre-construction baseline, that argument is very hard to beat: the burden of showing the damage is new effectively falls on you, and memory, or a handful of undated phone photos, rarely carries it.

A dilapidation report taken before works begin reverses the position. New damage is anything that appears in a post-construction comparison but not in the baseline. The dispute stops being about opinions and becomes a comparison of two dated documents.

If construction has already started — as it often has by the time a committee acts — the report is still worth commissioning immediately. A baseline taken part-way through works still protects you against everything from that date forward, and an inspector can often distinguish fresh cracking from aged cracking. Late is far better than never.

Who usually pays — and why you may already be covered

For significant developments, councils commonly impose conditions on the development approval requiring the developer to commission dilapidation surveys of adjoining and nearby properties before work starts, and again at completion. Two practical consequences for a committee:

1. Check the development approval. DA documents are public. If a dilapidation survey condition exists, the developer should be arranging — and paying for — an inspection of your building. If nobody has contacted the body corporate, that’s a letter to the developer (and, if ignored, to council) asking when the survey will occur.
2. Get your own copy. If the developer’s consultant inspects your building, the body corporate should request the report and keep it. A report that only exists in the developer’s filing system protects the developer.

Even where the developer commissions a survey, some committees choose to obtain their own independent report as well. The developer’s consultant is engaged by the developer; an independent report commissioned by the body corporate is evidence you control, covering the areas you consider vulnerable, at a scope you set. For a building already showing movement, that independence can matter.

What the committee should do, in order

1. Document what’s visible today. Dated photographs of every known crack and defect, logged with locations. This costs nothing and takes an afternoon.
2. Pull the development approval for the neighbouring site and check for dilapidation survey conditions and any vibration-monitoring conditions.
3. Write to the developer — request their pre-construction dilapidation report for your building, or notice of when the inspection will occur.
4. Obtain quotes for an independent report covering common property and, ideally, offering lot owners the option to include their lots. Compare scope carefully: number of dwellings covered, interior access, basement and roof inclusion, report format, and whether a post-construction re-inspection is priced in.
5. Table everything. The report, the correspondence, the quotes, the decision — all of it belongs in the body corporate’s records, because the whole value of this exercise is being able to produce the paper trail years later, possibly under a new committee and a new manager.
6. Report damage as it happens. New cracking gets photographed, dated, and notified to the developer in writing at the time — not saved up for the end.

The report is only as good as the record

Here’s the uncomfortable part: a dilapidation report protects nobody if it can’t be found. Construction damage claims often surface years after completion — when the building is repainted, when waterproofing fails, when a buyer’s inspector asks why the slab has moved. By then the committee has turned over, the manager may have changed, 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, with its date intact, whenever the question comes. That’s true of the report, the quotes obtained to commission it, and the decision that authorised it — a complete chain, held against the building rather than any person who happened to serve on the committee that year. StrataTrade exists to make 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, five years from now, when someone asks you to prove the crack wasn’t always there.

This article is general information for Queensland bodies corporate, not legal or engineering advice. Development approval conditions vary by council and by project — always check the specific approval for the site concerned, and seek professional advice for damage claims.