SCA (NSW) members, including Senior Vice President, Daniel Linders, tested the new strata building bond and inspections scheme online portal at the request of NSW Fair Trading in a session held on 2 November 2017.
Daniel said that the purpose of the system is to manage the booking and workflow of the building inspection process for defects under the building bond scheme.
“It’s accessible from the NSW Fair Trading website and is a fully online system designed to streamline the bond process and make it accessible without written forms for developers and building inspectors to complete.”
Fair Trading states the website is secure for uploading of sensitive and highly confidential information to protect privacy and is a self-service format that will be used by developers and inspectors.
“It seems to be a fairly easy system requiring developers and inspectors to upload information. Developers load up the details of the project and the contract price for the construction of the building and the 2 percent bond is then calculated. The bond may be paid by a bond instrument, such as a guarantee.”
When the bond instrument is lodged an administration fee will also be paid by the developer to Fair Trading.
At inspection time the developer nominates an inspector and confirms they don’t have a conflict of interest. The inspector then verifies they are willing to undertake the works and that they don’t have a conflict of interest with the developer.
Finally, the strata manager is then sent an email to accept the proposed inspector from the developer. The initial and final inspection reports are uploaded to the system.
For more information about the scheme, check out the NSW Fair Trading website here.
In addition to this SCA (NSW) Director, David Bannerman also wants to advise members that there are numerous amendments to the Home Building Reform Act concerning the building defects bond, which are due to be tabled shortly and will commence next year.
NSW Parliament sits next week and the week following so they are likely to be tabled then. Updates will be sent out as soon as we know something.