Twenty years of finding things before the client does.
I inspect, sign off and manage property work in Phuket and Koh Samui to the standards I qualified to in the UK. On any one unit I work for one side only, and I say which before I start.
- Qualified
- In the UK; based in Phuket
- Experience
- 20 years in construction, building surveying and project management
- Buildings
- Residential, mixed-use and commercial
- Method
- UK standards, applied to tropical construction
- Area
- Phuket and Koh Samui
- Paid by
- One side of each unit, at a fixed fee
Where the twenty years were spent.
I came into this through construction rather than through property sales, which is the difference that matters. Twenty years of it, across construction, building surveying and project management: residential, mixed-use and commercial buildings, on sites where my job was to find the defect before the client walked in and found it for me. You learn to read a building the way the people who built it read it — to know which corners are cut first, which details are skipped when a programme slips, and what the finished surface is usually hiding.
The management years matter as much as the surveying. Running projects means having sat on the other side of the snag list: knowing what a site manager can fix in a week, what needs a subcontractor back, and how a vague list gets quietly closed out without anything changing. That is why every item in my reports carries a location, a reference and a remedy — it is written to be acted on, not argued with.
Building surveying is largely a discipline of not being satisfied by appearance. A room that looks immaculate can have a floor with a third of its tiles unbonded, a shower with no fall to the gully, and a consumer unit with no earth bond to the wet area. None of that is visible. All of it is findable in an afternoon by somebody with a straightedge, a percussion hammer, a socket tester and the habit of checking.
Tropical construction fails in its own particular ways.
A villa here is not a UK house in a warmer climate. The pathology is different and you have to know it to look for it. Monsoon-driven water ingress is the dominant failure: not gentle rain but horizontal water at pressure for hours, finding every unlapped membrane, every short upstand, every terrace threshold that was detailed as though it would never be tested. Roof and terrace waterproofing is where the money is lost here, and it is almost always a detail rather than a material.
Then there is heat and movement. Screeds laid and tiled too quickly in high temperatures, with an adhesive bed that skinned before the tile went down, give you the hollow floors that show up in almost every new villa I inspect. Movement joints get omitted across long tiled runs. Renders debond off blockwork in sheets you can hear before you can see.
Air conditioning condensate is its own category of problem. A pipe run laid flat, or worse falling backwards, will not show anything at handover and will produce a stained ceiling in the second year. Humidity does the rest: it finds cold bridges, it sits in unventilated voids, and it turns a small ingress into mould faster than anywhere with a temperate climate.
Pools deserve their own inspection and rarely get one. Plant that is not bonded, valves that have never been run through backwash, decks that fall towards the house instead of away from it, lights on the wrong side of an RCD. And then there is the gap between the show villa and the delivered one — different tiles, different sanitaryware, different appliance specification, a pool a metre shorter. That gap is worth documenting on the day, in writing, before anyone signs.
One side of each unit, and never both.
This is the part of the business I will not compromise on, so it is worth stating without any hedging. I take no commission from any developer. I take no referral fee from any agent. I am not on any developer’s panel, preferred list or approved supplier register, and I do not want to be.
We inspect for developers and contractors as well as for buyers: signing off units before they are handed over is part of the business. One rule keeps that honest. On any single unit we act for one side only. If we have inspected a unit for its developer, we will not inspect that same unit for its buyer, and the other way round — and every report says at the top who commissioned it.
I also do not sell the rectification work. If your report lists forty defects, I have no financial interest in any of them being fixed by anybody in particular, which is precisely why the list can be as long as the property deserves. When we manage remedial work, we oversee it; we do not carry it out.
The practical consequence is that if I inspect a well-built villa I will tell you it is well built, and if I inspect a bad one I will tell you that in writing with photographs, and neither answer changes what I am paid.
If you have a handover date, the useful conversation starts there.
Tell us the date, the development and the property type. We will tell you when to book and what it will cost.