What it costs to have somebody check your build, market by market
Between a few hundred and a few thousand dollars a year, depending on how often somebody visits and where the property is. The visit fee is the small part: what actually decides the cost is frequency, travel, and how much of the work you take on yourself.
What moves the price between markets
- Local contractor rates, which differ by more between markets than anything else on this list.
- Travel: a property an hour from a city costs more to reach than one in it, every single visit.
- Property type and size. A villa takes longer to walk than an apartment, and a site with several buildings longer again.
- Frequency, which is the multiplier on all of the above and the number most people get wrong.
- Whether anybody has to be found, briefed and managed each time, or whether that is included.
The four ways of doing it, and what each really costs
| Option | The money | The rest of the cost |
|---|---|---|
| Developer updates | Nothing | Selected by the party with an interest in the answer, and not comparable month to month |
| Flying out | Flights and days, several times over a two-year build | You see two or three days out of seven hundred, on dates chosen by your calendar |
| A local engineer, engaged per visit | A few hundred a visit in most markets | Finding them, checking their independence, briefing them, and no consistency between visits |
| A regular arrangement | Per visit, on a fixed interval | None of the above, and it still cannot see what was covered up before it started |
Frequency decides more than the market does
The same visit, monthly, costs three times what it costs quarterly. That is obvious and it is still where most of the variation comes from: a monthly arrangement in a cheap market can cost more per year than a quarterly one in an expensive market.
Monthly is worth it while a site is active, because a change in the rate of work is visible between visits and invisible across a longer gap. On a paused or slow site, quarterly answers the same question for a third of the money.
The comparison worth making
Not against zero, but against the size of the payment it might affect. An off-plan instalment is typically five to fifteen per cent of the purchase price, and the question at each one is whether the stage that triggered it actually happened.
On that scale the annual cost of somebody looking is a fraction of one instalment. That is the arithmetic that matters, and it is why comparing quotes between markets is the less useful exercise.
Our own prices
Published, per district and per property type, on the pricing page rather than in this article. Deliberately: a figure written into a guide drifts from the price list the first time either changes, and a service selling verifiable information cannot have two different prices on its own site.
Questions on this
Is it cheaper in cheaper markets?
Per visit, usually yes, because contractor rates track the local economy. Per year the difference narrows, because frequency and travel matter more than the hourly rate.
Can I pay for one visit rather than a series?
Yes, and it answers a different question. One visit establishes a state; a series establishes a rate, and the rate is the thing you would act on.
When is it not worth paying for?
When your payments are tied to dates rather than progress and you have no intention of acting on what you learn. In that case you are buying reassurance, and it is fair to decide reassurance is not worth the money.
What does it cost to fly out instead?
More than the arrangement, in almost every case, once you count flights and days away. And it buys two or three days of coverage across a build that runs for two years.
Read one before you buy one
The specimen shows the whole structure: status, what each payment was meant to buy, the forecast with its range, the photographic record and the limits of what was checked.