What goes wrong in NSW buildings with defect orders

Finding 1: it is mostly water, and the water is already inside

The apartments law, the Residential Apartment Buildings Act, covers 74 of the 97 buildings with a rectification order. 73 of those orders include a defect table. In 64 of them, 88%, waterproofing is on the list. In 43, 59%, the order describes water that has already got into the homes themselves: stormwater coming into apartments below a balcony, plasterboard damaged by water in living areas, one unit vacated and deemed uninhabitable.

Waterproofing failures are rarely one defect. The same order typically lists a balcony with no overflow, a membrane laid badly at a construction joint, and a basement wall letting water in. Fire safety defects sit alongside them in more than half the buildings: fire doors that have deteriorated, sprinklers not built to the approved design, gaps in fire rated walls.

Finding 2: half of these buildings already had people living in them

A defect order sounds like something that happens to a building site. For at least 36 of the 74 apartment buildings, nearly half, the order document itself says the building is complete and occupied, or describes residents living with the defects. Only 8 are described as still under construction. The rest do not say either way, so the real share of occupied buildings is likely higher.

Where an order states when work started, the defects reached the register years later: for the 12 buildings with a start date, the median gap between the start of work and the first order is about seven and a half years. That sample is small, so read it as an illustration, not a rate. The law reaches back too: the apartments law applies to buildings still being built or completed within the last ten years.

Finding 3: the new front is houses in new estates

Since 2024 the Commission’s inspectors can also enter and inspect freestanding houses and order defects fixed. The first house order on the register is dated 25 July 2024. Since then 23 houses and small dwellings have received rectification orders, and in 21 of them the defects are structural.

Nine of the 23 are in Sydney’s new land release suburbs: Austral, Leppington, Catherine Field, Bardia and Vineyard, new estates on the edge of the city. Six of the nine name the same building company. That cluster says as much about where inspectors looked as about building quality: the Commission selects inspections by risk, random sampling and the track record of the builders involved, so one bad build can lead inspectors to a builder’s other homes.

What the register cannot tell you

It is tempting to read the rise in orders, from 1 in 2021 to 53 so far in 2026, as proof that building quality is falling, or that recent government incentives to build more homes have produced worse homes. The register does not support either claim. The apartments law only began in September 2020, Building Commission NSW started on 1 December 2023 with more inspectors, and the power over houses came after that. More inspectors find more defects.

Nor can the orders be matched to boom years: only 12 of 97 buildings state when work began. What the orders do show is which defects inspectors find when they look, and that the people most exposed are owners and tenants already living in the homes.

What this means if you are buying

For an apartment under ten years old: search the address on the register, ask the strata manager for any defect reports, building bond inspections and special levies, and look closely at balconies, ceilings under balconies and the basement after rain. For a new house in an estate: an independent inspection at each stage of the build is worth more than one at handover, because structural defects are hard to see once the walls are lined.

Method: we downloaded the order document for every entry on the Building Commission NSW Register of building work orders as read on 27 September 2026 (136 entries; two documents could not be retrieved). For each order we recorded the law it was issued under, the kind of order, the building as described, the status the document states, inspection and start dates where given, and the defect categories from its defect table. Counts are by building, so two orders at one address count once. A building is counted as occupied only where the document says so. A sample of the water classifications was checked by hand against the order text. The register is a record of where the regulator looked, not a survey of all buildings. Reuse welcome with attribution to PropertyFlags and Building Commission NSW: hello@propertyflags.com.au.

This month’s changes to the register · How many apartments sit in these buildings · How to search the register yourself · Run a free flag count on an address

Sources

• NSW Register of building work orders (Building Commission NSW) · the 134 order documents analysed
• Commission inspectors now have the power to inspect houses (Master Builders NSW) · house inspection powers and how inspections are selected
• Building Commission NSW now in operation (HIA) · start date of the Commission
• Initial reforms to the NSW construction industry: the RAB Act (Lionheart Lawyers) · commencement on 1 September 2020

All sources queried or checked on 1 October 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.