Editorial standards

This page is the rulebook. If a piece on the site drifts from it, the piece is wrong.

Independence

We do not take payment for an unmarked mention of an inspector, a builder, a pest company or a conveyancer. We do not run a “preferred partner” list. Staff writers do not inspect houses for a fee while writing about the trade under this masthead.

Sources

Standards such as AS 4349.1 and AS 4349.3, NSW Fair Trading licensing, and council or mine-subsidence public records are cited in plain language. We do not invent clause numbers. Where practice varies between inspectors, we say so.

Voice

Australian English. We write “licence”, “organisation”, “storey”, “ageing” and “program” as the house uses them. We prefer a specific suburb to a vague “the region”. We do not write as if the reader is a lead.

Corrections

Factual errors are corrected on the page and noted with a date. Send evidence through the contact form. We will not argue with a photograph of a cracked pier.

Photographs

Every photograph is Creative Commons or public domain, stored in this repository, and credited on the page and on the image credits page. We do not scrape real-estate listings for hero images.

Commercial mentions

Guest essays and paid mentions, when accepted, carry rel="sponsored" on the relevant links. See write for us. A sponsored link is not a staff recommendation.

Advice

Nothing on this site is a building report, a pest report, legal advice or a substitute for a licensed inspection. Read the reports and standards hub if you need the limits said slowly.