Your builder warranty is about to expire

A builder warranty ends on a fixed date, and a defect that was never reported before that date becomes yours to pay for. The practical window is four to six weeks ahead of expiry: long enough to have the property looked at, to put the unresolved items in writing, and to still have room to submit and to argue before the period closes.

Two clocks, and confusing them is expensive

The contractual warranty period is whatever your purchase agreement says, often twelve months from the day you took the keys. The statutory period is set by national law and cannot be shortened by contract: Portugal imposes five years on new construction, and several jurisdictions impose ten on structural failure.

The contractual clock covers the ordinary things: a door that has dropped, tiling that has lifted, a leaking joint. The statutory clock covers the serious ones, which is why a crack appearing in year three is still worth raising even though the developer will say the warranty expired.

What ends the period is the date, not the repair. A leak that starts in the first winter after a summer handover is reported inside the window. The same leak in the second winter may not be.

What the report contains at this point

The report is the same product at every stage of a purchase, and it costs the same. What changes is what it is filled with, and before a warranty expires the report leads with the list below. Ordering it, you say what the visit is for — how the building is coming along, before the warranty runs out, or a payment milestone — and the warranty check is the second of those three.

• Photographs carrying the day they were taken
• A written note on what they show, in your language
• What the contract says should be there by now, set against what was found
• A completion range, where the building allows one to be given

Before the date

Useful whether or not you order anything from us. If the developer answers all of it in writing, you have what you needed and we are not required.

1. Find the expiry date. It is usually counted from handover, not from completion, and the difference can be months.
2. Collect what you already reported and what came back. Anything unresolved goes on the list regardless of how long ago it was raised.
3. Book the check four to six weeks out, so there is time to submit and to argue.
4. Submit in writing before the date, even if the list is incomplete. A late addition to a submitted claim is a different conversation from a first claim after expiry.

What closes the contractual window is the expiry date, not the state of the repair, and the statutory period runs separately and longer. Checking the property four to six weeks out is what leaves time to find whatever is still open, write it down and submit it while the date is still ahead of you.