Punch list

The two words describe the same document, and which one appears in your contract usually tells you where the drafting came from rather than anything about the process. Miami and Riviera Maya contracts tend to say punch list; Dubai, Cyprus and Bali contracts more often say snagging. Portugal and Brazil use vistoria for the walkthrough that produces it.

The list is compiled at a walkthrough near the end of construction. Someone goes room by room recording what is missing, damaged or wrong: a scratched worktop, a socket that is dead, paint that stops short behind a radiator. Each item is assigned to a trade, and the contractor works through them.

A punch list is a closing document. It exists because the building is finished, and its whole subject is the finish. Structure, waterproofing and services buried in walls and slabs are not on it and cannot be. They were covered up months earlier, and there is nothing left to walk through and look at.

The commercial position also changes at this point. Before completion, unpaid instalments give a buyer leverage: work has to reach a stated state before money moves. Once the punch list exists, most or all of the price has been paid, and each line on it is a request the contractor may action quickly, slowly, or not at all.

None of which makes the list unimportant. It is the record of what you objected to before you accepted the property, and in a later dispute the absence of such a record is worse than an incomplete one. It is simply the last thing in a long sequence, not a substitute for the sequence.