More than 5,500 NSW apartments sit in buildings named on the NSW register of building work orders

1. This year is already the biggest year on the register

The register listed 132 orders when we read it in full on 14 August 2026. Of those, 43 were issued in 2026, and the year is seven and a half months old. That is more than any full earlier year shown on the register: 30 orders dated 2025, 37 dated 2024. The newest order on the register was issued on 13 August 2026, the day before this analysis.

Orders currently published on the register, grouped by their issue date. The register is a live document: orders can be added and removed, so historical years reflect what remained published as at 14 August 2026, not every order ever issued.

2. An estimated 5,585 homes sit at the addresses named

An order names a building, but people live in apartments. We matched each order location against the Geocoded National Address File and counted the individual unit addresses at the named locations: an estimated 5,585 apartments across 70 buildings and complexes. The single largest is a Meadowbank complex with 382 unit addresses. The ten largest:

An order on the register speaks for itself and some orders are later complied with; the register entry for any address, including the works required and the parties named, is the authoritative record. Each figure here is the count of unit addresses at the order location, not a claim about any individual apartment.

3. It is not a Sydney story

The postcode with the most orders on the register is 2500: Wollongong, with seven. Lake Macquarie's Mount Hutton has four, Gosford three, Terrigal two. Regional apartment buyers are, if anything, less likely to have heard of the register than Sydney buyers.

Method, in full

Source: the Building Commission NSW Register of building work orders (nsw.gov.au, CC BY 4.0), read in full on 14 August 2026: 132 published orders (83 building work rectification orders, 24 rectification orders, 13 prohibition orders, 12 stop work orders). 108 orders carried an address we could geocode; orders naming the same location were counted as one building (87 unique locations). Unit counts come from the Geocoded National Address File: unit addresses within 25 metres of the order location, each address counted once across the whole analysis. The 25 metre radius is deliberately tight, and 24 orders could not be geocoded at all, so the 5,585 figure is best read as a floor, not a ceiling. We are happy to share the order level working with any journalist: hello@propertyflags.com.au.

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PropertyFlags reads official government registers, including this one, for a single address and puts the findings in one report for buyers and renters. This analysis is published under CC BY 4.0: reuse it with attribution to PropertyFlags and Building Commission NSW.

Sources

• NSW Register of building work orders (Building Commission NSW) — the public register of serious defect and building work orders this analysis counts
• Residential Apartment Buildings (Compliance and Enforcement Powers) Act 2020 (NSW) — the law the orders are issued under

All sources queried or checked on 14 August 2026. If a figure on this page and a source disagree, tell us at hello@propertyflags.com.au and we will correct the page.

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Research pages and guides are general information built from public government data as at the dates stated, not legal, financial or professional advice. Registers change; verify anything that matters for a decision with the authority that keeps the register.