Twenty years of finding things before the client does.
I inspect properties in Phuket for the people buying them. That is the whole business, and it is deliberately the whole business.
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: 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.
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.
We work for the buyer, and for nobody else.
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.
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. An inspector who also quotes for the remedial work has a reason to find defects; an inspector on a developer’s panel has a reason not to. Both are compromised in opposite directions. The only way to avoid it is to be paid a fixed fee by the buyer and to take nothing from anyone else.
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.