Owner representatives fear the pause to the National Construction Code will mean the tab for repairs will be passed on to buyers of new housing, which is mainly units and townhouses. Photo: Michelle Kroll.
The four-year pause to the National Construction Code (NCC) will not apply to the multi-unit sector’s chronic issue of waterproofing and condensation, but concerns remain that building quality will be compromised in coming years as the rush to meet housing targets gathers pace.
It is understood that the NCC updates to waterproofing and condensation mitigation will fall into the category of important safety and quality changes, although it is not known whether all the proposed changes will be retained.
As water penetration and mould are two of the most common defects in medium and high-density developments, this apparent carve-out has been welcomed by owner representatives.
However, the pause overall is still considered to be a bad idea and a concession to the building lobbies that successfully argued at the recent productivity roundtable that their members are already struggling to cope with costs and the new NCC provisions would be too onerous and impede reaching the Albanese Government’s housing target of 1.2 million new homes by mid-2029.
Owner representatives fear that the pause, which also will impact energy efficiency and electrification changes, will mean remedial costs will be passed on to the buyers of this new housing, most of which will be units and townhouses.
With climate adaptation an evolving issue, there are also concerns that new housing won’t cope with environmental challenges.
ACT Owners Corporation Network president Gary Petherbridge said excluding the waterproofing and condensation provisions in their entirety would be the sensible thing to do, given 80 to 90 per cent of defects related to penetration in apartments.
Otherwise, many of these new apartments would eventually become unlivable and uninsurable.
“The concern is that this issue will continue to dog developments in Canberra,” he said.
Many apartment owners bought off the plan before a sod was turned and then down the track faced levies struck to commission reports and pay for rectifications that they could not afford, forcing some to sell and return to the rental market.
Mr Petherbridge said a balcony defect could cost up to $50,000 to fix.
“The owners have then got to pay for it because by that time the builders have gone, the developers have gone, so it’s up to the owners,” he said.
The other issues owners faced relate to retrofitting electric vehicle charging, rooftop solar, batteries and converting from gas to electricity, which the 2025 NCC proposals addressed.
Mr Petherbridge suggested a cheap government loan scheme similar to the 4.2 per cent combustible cladding arrangements could be the way forward for owners.
Property lawyer and strata specialist Susan Proctor said the pause would delay the adoption of innovative building materials and practices, leaving new buildings unable to weather future climatic events.
“They’ll get damaged to an extent that they won’t be insurable and they won’t be able to be occupied,” she said.
Ms Proctor said if Cyclone Alfred had hit Brisbane with its full force, many buildings not built to standards applicable further north would have been impacted.
She said the buyer, the end consumer, was not being considered in the rush to build more homes.
“It’s been looked at from a housing as a commodity viewpoint rather than housing has to be safe and livable and sustainable viewpoint,” she said.
“We’re looking at it from the consumer protection viewpoint. That’s necessary because it’s people who live in these environments.”
Homes needed to be safe, sustainable, fit for purpose and affordable, not just in terms of the price but in their continuity of being able to be occupied.
Property lawyer Susan Proctor said strata buyers were not being considered. Photo: Proctor Legal.
Mr Petherbridge said the NCC pause and continuing defects hurt confidence generally in the building industry, something the 2018 Shergold-Weir report was supposed to address.
“If you don’t do something serious about building back confidence, you can build these places, but people won’t buy them,” Mr Petherbridge said.
“So it’s a cascading effect all around.”
He understood the building lobbies sought to create as much activity as they could, but he feared they hoped that quality would look after itself.
“Well, quality doesn’t always look after itself,” Mr Petherbridge said.
“Sometimes you’ve got to have a little bit of regulation in there that drives standards.”
Apart from the NCC pause, Ms Proctor said there were myriad issues for owner corporations to negotiate, plan for and fund.
The burden on them and individual owners was considerable and sometimes too much to bear. She said strata property owners suffered a disproportionate number of bankruptcies in the ACT.
Ms Proctor backed the move for a properly resourced, government-funded strata commissioner to support Canberra’s growing population of strata-titled property owners, which Labor promised at the 2024 election but has since been slammed over for not providing enough funding.
She said Canberra’ under-resourced owner corporations needed standardised education materials to guide them.
“It’s really incumbent and a wise investment for government to make living in strata as simple and easy as possible,” Ms Proctor said.
She echoed Mr Petherbridge’s concerns about the ACT’s electrification program and the costs that owners will incur, also suggesting that some buildings may not be worth the investment required.
Ms Proctor also pointed to a paper in NSW arguing for rectification projects to continue to be exempt from planning approvals to minimise the costs for owners.
“I am not aware of any similar research or analysis being conducted in the ACT, but this is where I am concerned that owners corporations, and therefore owners and occupiers, are not being adequately considered from a consumer protection viewpoint in the ACT,” she said.
