The report lands in the evening, usually while you are trying to get dinner on, and there is a particular way it gets read the first time. You scroll. You look for the red items. You count them. Then you ring us and ask the question the whole document was written to answer: is this house a problem, or is this normal? Learning how to read a building inspection report is mostly learning to stop counting findings and start sorting them, because a report is not a score out of ten. It is a list of facts about a house, ranked by how much they should matter to you.
Here is the short version, then the detail.
A building inspection report describes the condition of a house on the day it was inspected, and grades each finding by how serious it is. Read it in this order: the limitations and access notes first, so you know what was not seen, then the major findings, then the detail behind each one. A Datum pre-purchase report grades findings as Pass, Minor or Major, but severity labels are set by each company rather than by a national scale, so check the definitions the report gives before you read anything into its wording. The number of findings is not the score. A long report on an old house is usually a thorough inspector rather than a bad property. What you are looking for is the small number of findings that change the decision rather than the budget: moisture and weathertightness, structural movement, and the known problem materials. Everything else is a maintenance list, and every house has one.
What the report actually is
A pre-purchase report is a record of what a trained person could see on one day, written down and ranked. That is all, and it is quite a lot.
NZS 4306:2005, the New Zealand standard for residential property inspection, describes itself as introducing consistency and reliability into the inspection of residential properties, and as setting out the minimum requirements for the visual inspection of residential buildings and for the preparation of the reports that follow. Two words in that are worth holding on to. Minimum, because the standard is a floor rather than a ceiling, and reports vary a great deal above it. Visual, because as Consumer Protection puts it, an inspection of this kind will not identify problems concealed behind finished surfaces such as framing, plumbing, insulation or wiring.
So the report tells you about condition. It does not tell you whether to buy the house, and it cannot, because that answer depends on the price, your budget, your appetite for work and what else is on the market, none of which the inspector knows. We can tell you that the valley flashing is rusted through and needs replacing. Whether that changes what the house is worth to you is a different question, and it is yours.
The other thing to understand early is that a finding is not an accusation. Most of what is in a report is simply the truthful state of a building that has been standing in the weather for decades. Our guide to what a pre-purchase inspection covers sets out the scope in detail, including the parts of a house that are deliberately outside it.
How findings are graded, and why the words differ
Grading exists so that a report can separate the shower that needs resealing from the wall that needs opening up. Without it you get a flat list where a cracked path and a leaking roof sit at the same weight, which is the failure mode of a badly written report.
A Datum pre-purchase report grades each finding as Pass, Minor or Major. Broadly, a Pass means nothing of concern was found in that area on the day. A Minor is a real fault, but one that is ordinary for the age of the house and sits in the maintenance pile: a tired seal, a blocked gutter, a missing RCD on a garage circuit. A Major is something we think should affect your decision or your budget before you commit, such as several high moisture readings in one area, or a rusted valley flashing that is letting water into the roof space.
Now the part that reports rarely say out loud.
There is no national severity scale that all New Zealand inspectors use, and because building inspection is not a regulated occupation here, nothing compels one. Our Pass, Minor and Major are ours. Another company may use numbered grades, traffic lights, or words like "significant" and "monitor", and their Grade 3 is not our Major in any reliable way. This means you cannot compare two houses by comparing two inspectors, and that includes comparing our report with one from another company. Read each report against its own definitions page, and if a report does not have one, that tells you something too.
It is also worth knowing that a grade is a judgement, not a measurement. Two competent inspectors can look at the same hairline crack and land on different labels, because they are weighing the same evidence with slightly different experience. That is not a flaw to hide. It is the reason the sentence underneath the grade matters more than the grade itself, and why a report should always say what was found, where it is, and what it means, rather than just colouring it in. If you only take away the coloured pill and skip the paragraph, you have thrown away the useful part.
Normal wear or a real problem
This is the distinction most buyers actually want, and it is more learnable than it looks. The question to ask of any finding is not "is this bad" but "is this what I would expect on a house of this age, and is it getting worse".
- Cracking. Fine hairline cracks in the plaster of an older villa, especially above doorways, are usually the house moving with the seasons as it has for ninety years. Diagonal cracks running out from the corners of windows, cracks you can fit a coin into, or cracks that line up across a wall and a floor are a different conversation, because they suggest movement in the structure rather than in the finish.
- Borer. Old borer holes in native timber are extremely common in New Zealand houses and often long dead. What matters is whether it is active, which shows as fresh, pale dust below the holes, and whether it has reached anything structural in the subfloor. One is history. The other is a repair.
- Tired wet areas. Perished silicone around a bath, grout that needs redoing, a shower door that drips onto the floor: normal, cheap, and worth fixing before it stops being cheap. A shower tray that flexes underfoot, staining on the ceiling below a bathroom, or a soft patch in the wall beside the shower is the same family of problem several years further along.
- Roof and gutters. Surface rust on an old steel roof, moss, and gutters full of leaves are maintenance. Rust that has gone through, failed or missing flashings at the junctions, and water staining in the roof space are not.
- Timber decay outside. Weathered paint on a deck is cosmetic. Timber you can push a screwdriver into is structural, and it usually means water has been sitting somewhere it should not for a long time.
The pattern in all of those is the same. Ordinary wear is slow, visible, and priced in tradesperson hours. A real problem is water going somewhere hidden, or the structure moving. When you sort your report into those two piles, most of it lands in the first, and the second pile is short. That short pile is the report.
Why a long report is not a worse house
The most common mistake we see is counting. A buyer opens a forty-item report on a 1930s bungalow, opens a twelve-item report on a 2005 townhouse, and concludes the bungalow is the worse property. Very often it is the other way around, and the count is telling you about the inspector and the age of the house rather than the risk you are taking on.
Older houses have more findings because there is more house to have findings about, and because ninety years of weather leaves marks. Settled.govt.nz says as much directly: many wooden houses in New Zealand are over 50 years old, and there will be things the inspector needs to point out. A long list on an old villa is usually the sound of somebody doing the job properly.
A short report deserves more suspicion than a long one, not less. It can mean a genuinely tidy house. It can also mean an inspection that did not get into the subfloor, did not get onto the roof, or was written to be reassuring. The thing to check is not the number of findings but the coverage: does the report say which areas were inspected, which were not accessible and why, and does it commit to a position on each item rather than hedging every one into "recommend further investigation".
Read the report for its worst three findings, not its length. If the three worst things are a rusted downpipe, a dead extractor fan and some perished silicone, that is a good report on a sound house, and it does not matter whether the list runs to fifty items.
The findings worth stopping for
A small number of findings should slow the process down rather than just add to a spreadsheet.
Moisture and weathertightness. Elevated moisture readings, especially clustered around windows, cladding junctions or wet areas, are the finding most likely to be expensive and hidden. What a reading means depends heavily on where it was taken and what it is compared against, which is the subject of our guide to what a high moisture reading actually means. If the house is a plaster or monolithic-clad home from the high-risk era, read that finding alongside our guide to leaky homes in NZ before you do anything else.
Structural movement. Anything about piles, bearers, foundations or framing that suggests the house is moving is an engineer question, not a builder question, and the report should say so rather than estimate it.
Known problem materials. Consumer Protection names several specifically, and they turn up in reports all the time in New Zealand:
- Dux Quest pipework. Plastic piping used in houses in the late 1970s and early 1980s, distinctive black pipe with white lettering, discontinued after pipes and fittings burst around the country. Settled.govt.nz has the detail, and insurers take a close interest in it.
- Weatherside cladding. A wood and glue product popular in the early 1980s that swelled, delaminated and turned to mush. The only fix is to replace the cladding, so this is a budget item rather than a maintenance one.
- Asbestos. Common in New Zealand houses from the mid-1940s until the mid-1980s, including textured ceilings, fibre cement sheet and the backing of some vinyl flooring. Undisturbed and in good condition it is often left alone, and it becomes a live issue when it deteriorates or when you start renovating.
- Plaster-style monolithic cladding. Not a defect in itself, and plenty of these homes are sound. It raises the question of what sits behind it, and that question deserves an answer before you commit.
None of these is automatically a reason to walk away. All of them are a reason to get a specialist opinion and a real number while you still have the option to act on it.
Start with the limitations and access notes, not the findings. They tell you what the inspection could not see: the subfloor nobody could crawl into, the roof that was too wet to walk, the wall hidden behind a wardrobe full of the belongings of whoever lives there. A finding you can read about is already handled. It is the unexamined high-risk area that carries the unknown, and it is the part buyers skip most often.
What to do with it
Once you have sorted the report, the work is fairly mechanical.
Ring the inspector. A good report should survive a phone call, and any decent inspector would rather spend ten minutes explaining a finding than have you guess at it. Ask the two questions that matter on any Major item: how confident are you, and what would it take to know for certain.
Get real numbers on the significant items rather than estimating them yourself. A roofer, an electrician or an engineer quoting on the actual defect turns an anxiety into a figure, and a figure is something you can negotiate with or budget for.
Then mind the timing, because it decides how much the report is worth to you. Findings discovered while you still have a condition in your agreement are leverage. The same findings discovered afterwards are simply your new maintenance schedule. This is why we push same-day turnaround, and it is why an auction timeline needs the inspection to happen earlier than most buyers expect. On what the report means for your agreement, talk to your solicitor. Consumer Protection gives the same advice for serious problems on an unconditional offer, and it is not advice we are qualified to give.
One last thing on vendor reports. If the seller or the agent hands you one, read it, but do not lean on it. Settled.govt.nz is blunt about why: if you buy the property and later find problems that cost a lot to fix, that report does not protect you, because the inspector had a contract with the seller rather than with you. It is useful background. It is not your report. When you commission your own pre-purchase house inspection, the person who wrote it answers to you, and you can ask them anything you like about what they saw.
A building report is evidence, sorted and ranked, and reading it well means separating the maintenance list from the two or three findings that actually bear on your decision. If you have a report in front of you and cannot tell which is which, get in touch and we will talk you through it. If you would rather have qualified builders working to NZS 4306 look at the property for you, book an inspection.
This article is general information, not professional or legal advice. For a specific property, get your own inspection and talk to your solicitor.