Before the day
Get the handover date in writing and ask for the unit to be fully energised beforehand: power on, water connected, air conditioning commissioned. Services that have never run cannot be tested, and a developer who says they will be connected after handover is asking you to accept them untested.
Gather the documents you bought against. The inspection is a comparison between what was promised and what was built, so you need the promise in front of you.
- Your sale and purchase agreement and its specification schedule
- The approved floor plan, plus any variation you agreed in writing
- A phone with plenty of storage, a good torch and a roll of masking tape for marking defects
- A plug-in socket tester if you are checking the electrics yourself
Water: where most condo defects start
Run every tap, basin, bath and shower for several minutes, then look underneath and around. A trap that weeps only after five minutes of flow will not show on a quick check. Watch how each floor drain copes: water should run to the gully without pooling, and a shower tray or wet-room floor should fall towards its drain, not away from it.
Go out onto the balcony. Check the threshold upstand at the sliding door, the balcony drain and the fall of the floor. In monsoon season this is where water is driven into the unit, and it is far cheaper to have it fixed before you move furniture in.
Finally, look up. Stains or bubbled paint on your ceiling usually mean a leak from above or a condensate pipe laid without fall — both worth recording on the day, even if the source is in someone else’s unit.
Electrics and air conditioning
Test every socket for correct polarity and earth, and press the test button on each RCD in the consumer unit — it should trip immediately. Switch on every light and every extractor fan.
Run each air-conditioning unit on cool for at least twenty minutes. Check the air coming out is properly cold, that the unit is not dripping inside, and that condensate is reaching its drain outside. Then run the water heater and confirm the temperature at the furthest outlet.
Finishes: tap, look, sight along
Tap floor tiles with a coin or the handle of a screwdriver. A hollow sound means the adhesive bed is incomplete, and hollow tiles crack under load months later. Note how many and where — a report that says “six of forty-four tiles hollow in bedroom two” gets fixed; one that says “some hollow tiles” does not.
Hold a torch flat against walls and ceilings so the light rakes across the surface; it shows every ripple and patch. Open, close and lock every door and window, check the seals, and clear the drainage slots in sliding-door tracks. In the kitchen, check door alignment, hinges, worktop joints and the silicone behind the sink, and switch on every appliance.
Compare what you got with what you bought
Walk through the specification schedule item by item: tile type, sanitaryware brand, appliance models, wardrobes, worktop material. Photograph labels and model numbers. Substitutions are common and are easiest to raise on the day, in writing, while the developer still needs your signature.
The parts of the building that affect you
Some things are not in your unit but will still become your problem: the riser your drainage connects to, the waterproofing under your balcony, the route your AC condensate takes, the location and labelling of your meters. Note anything visibly wrong and report it to the developer and, once it exists, the juristic person that manages the building.
Write it down so it gets fixed
Give every defect a reference number, a location, a description, a photograph and the remedy you expect. Hand the list over before you sign, ask for it to be acknowledged in writing, and agree a date when you will check the work. A vague list gets closed out without anything changing; a numbered one can be ticked off item by item.
You can see exactly how we lay this out in our sample report, and the blank inspection sheets are free to print if you would rather do it yourself. If you would rather it was done for you, a condo inspection is a fixed fee with the photographic report within 48 hours — see the fees.