What it costs to check your build, market by market

Checking a build typically runs between a few hundred and a few thousand dollars a year, and the per-visit fee is the smaller factor. What actually sets the total is how often somebody visits, how far they have to travel, and how much of the record-keeping you take on yourself.

What moves the price between markets

• Local contractor rates, which differ by more between markets than anything else on this list.
• Travel: a property an hour from a city costs more to reach than one in it, every single visit.
• Property type and size. A villa takes longer to walk than a townhouse, and a plot with outbuildings longer again. An apartment is not walked at all during construction — nobody is let inside one — so it is covered from outside, at one price a month.
• Frequency, which is the multiplier on all of the above and the number most people get wrong.
• Whether anybody has to be found, briefed and managed each time, or whether that is included.

The four ways of doing it, and what each really costs

Option	The money	The rest of the cost
Developer updates	Nothing	Selected by the party with an interest in the answer, and not comparable month to month
Flying out	Flights and days, several times over a two-year build	You see two or three days out of seven hundred, on dates chosen by your calendar
A local engineer, engaged per visit	A few hundred a visit in most markets	Finding them, checking their independence, briefing them, and no consistency between visits
A regular arrangement	Per visit, on a fixed interval	None of the above, and it still cannot see what was covered up before it started

Frequency decides more than the market does

The same visit, monthly, costs three times what it costs quarterly. That is obvious and it is still where most of the variation comes from: a monthly arrangement in a cheap market can cost more per year than a quarterly one in an expensive market.

Monthly is worth it while a site is active, because a change in the rate of work is visible between visits and invisible across a longer gap. On a paused or slow site, quarterly answers the same question for a third of the money.

The comparison worth making

Not against zero, but against the size of the payment it might affect. An off-plan instalment is typically five to fifteen per cent of the purchase price, and the question at each one is whether the stage that triggered it actually happened.

On that scale the annual cost of somebody looking is a fraction of one instalment. That is the arithmetic that matters, and it is why comparing quotes between markets is the less useful exercise.

Our own prices

Published, per district and per property type, on the pricing page rather than in this article. Deliberately: a figure written into a guide drifts from the price list the first time either changes, and a service selling verifiable information cannot have two different prices on its own site.

The cost of checking a build sits between a few hundred and a few thousand dollars a year, driven far more by how often somebody visits than by which market you are in. Weighed against the size of a single instalment it protects, that annual cost is usually a small fraction of it.