Building Inspections in Ettalong Beach, Central Coast

About forty per cent of the dwellings at Ettalong are attached, and mostly they are villas and townhouses rather than towers. In attached stock the boundary matters more than the building. The inspection covers your lot: wet areas, the balcony and its membrane, joinery, finishes and the internal structure. Roofs, facades, common driveways and shared drainage belong to the owners corporation, and a strata report from the managing agent covers those. Buy both and read them side by side.

It changes what you find. About one in six dwellings here was unoccupied on census night, and intermittent occupancy shows up as deferred maintenance rather than wear: perished window and door seals, tap and shower seals that have dried out, a bathroom that has been closed up and grown mould, roof plumbing nobody has cleared. None of it is dramatic on its own. Taken together it is often the largest number on a first-year repair budget, which is why the report itemises it.

Salt reaches everything metal. Roof sheeting, flashings, gutter brackets, fixings, garage tracks and balustrades all corrode faster within sight of the water, and balustrades in particular are a safety item as well as a maintenance one. Foreshore erosion at Ettalong is a live local issue and Council has run works along this frontage, but that is a public asset question rather than a building one. What we report on is the condition of the building and the structures inside your boundary.

Yes, alongside the newer villas and the two big apartment projects. The peninsula converted from campground to permanent suburb through the post-war decades, exactly when fibre cement sheeting was the standard cladding, so eave sheeting and external walls on older houses are worth identifying. The inspection records suspected asbestos-containing material by sight, notes where it is and describes its condition. Confirming the material itself needs a licensed sample and a lab test, which is a separate piece of work.

They answer different questions and come from different people. Our building inspection is a visual assessment to AS 4349.1 of the property you are buying, carried out on site, and it tells you the condition of what is yours. A strata report is a review of the owners corporation records, bought from a separate provider, and it tells you about levies, sinking fund balance, past resolutions and any building work affecting common property. Neither replaces the other, and on Ettalong strata stock you want both.

We aim to email the report on the day of the inspection, subject to access and availability, so you can use it inside the cooling-off period. Tell us the date you are working to when you book. If the property is a holiday let, mention that early, because key access through a managing agent takes longer to arrange than a standard vendor handover. Calls about anything in the report are free for twelve months after it is issued.