Property inspectors in Perth: what they do

1. What property inspectors do

A property inspector looks over a building and sets down what was seen. The work is usually a visual check of the parts that can be reached on the day: the roof space, the space under the floor, the walls inside and out, the wet areas and the grounds. The report that follows describes the condition of the building and notes defects, wear, and anything that may want a closer look from a specialist trade.

People often arrange an inspection before they commit to a purchase, so that they know more about the state of a building than a listing or a walk-through shows. Reports commonly sort what they find into the structural and the non-structural, flagging items that look major alongside smaller maintenance notes. Readers meet words such as defect, major defect, minor defect and maintenance item, along with the name of each area of the building that was checked.

An inspection is a snapshot of a building on one day, and inspectors generally say so in the report, because some things cannot be seen without opening up a wall or a floor. What a reader weighs is the scope of the inspection, how the findings are set out, and which items are left for a specialist trade to look at further.

2. About Perth

Perth is the capital of Western Australia and the state's largest city. Most of the city spreads across the Swan Coastal Plain, the sandy, relatively flat ground that runs from the Indian Ocean inland to the Darling Scarp. The traditional lands here are those of the Whadjuk Noongar people, whose presence in the area goes back at least 48,000 years. Boorloo, the Noongar name for the area, is sometimes used to mean the capital city as a whole.

Perth began in 1829, when Captain James Stirling founded it as the seat of government for the Swan River Colony. The city took its name from Perth in Scotland. Queen Victoria proclaimed it a city in 1856. After gold was found at Kalgoorlie and Coolgardie later in the century, Perth became a key supply hub for the goldfields, and its population rose from approximately 8,500 in 1881 to 61,000 by 1901. Mining booms from the late 20th century into the early 21st made Perth the base for major mining operations.