Why we exist

Imagine you have bought an apartment. It might be your first step onto the housing market. It might be your first home, or an investment property you saved years to put a deposit on.

You move in, or your tenants do. Within months, water is leaking through the windows and through the walls. Mould blooms behind the wardrobe. The carpet smells. The ceiling stains spread.

You get experts in. They write a defect list. It is long.

The builder finds out. The builder's company is wound up the following week. The builder is fine. The directors keep their houses. The phoenix company has already been set up under a slightly different name.

You apply to the Building Commission NSW for help. The program your strata manager mentions has rules. One of those rules is that the developer or builder must still be trading. Yours is not, on paper. Your application goes nowhere.

You ask the question every apartment owner in this situation asks. Can we just fix it ourselves? You are told that if you do, you forfeit any prospect of the regulator helping you. So you wait. And the water keeps coming.

You hire lawyers. You spend tens of thousands of dollars. The case goes nowhere because the company that built your building does not exist any more, even though the people who built it are still building. They have moved on to the next site. The next set of owners. The next set of leaks.

Meanwhile the water has caused mould. Your insurance premium has tripled, if your insurer will renew at all. The smell is in the soft furnishings now. You have spent more on lawyers than the repair would have cost in the first place.

So you do what people in your situation always do in the end. You pay to fix it yourself. At a loss. Just so you can sell the apartment and walk away from the whole thing.

And the people who built it? They are fine.

Why we are telling you this

This is a composite of stories we have heard from owners across NSW. Names, locations, and amounts are not those of any one person. The pattern is.

This is what the system looks like from the inside when you are the one living in the building. It is a pattern we have seen play out for the better part of a decade, and the recent reforms, as welcome as they are, do not help the buildings already standing.

Everyone deserves a dry, safe place to live.

We are not lawyers. We cannot make a phoenixing builder pay. We cannot rewrite the rules of the Residential Apartment Buildings Act.

What we can do is this. We can stand on the other side of the table from the contractors and tell you, in writing, what is actually wrong with your building, what it will take to fix it properly, and what good looks like when it is done. We can document the work to a standard that holds up against insurers, certifiers, and any future purchaser's due diligence. We can give you something that a court, a regulator, or a buyer cannot wave away.

That is the part of the problem we can solve. So we do.

What we believe

Our mission is to build things to last. A building should outlast the membrane that waterproofs it, and a repair should hold for decades, not months. That is what proper detailing and honest documentation are for.

We work to two values, generosity and integrity. Generosity, because we would rather give a strata committee a straight answer than sell them the same repair twice. Integrity, because we sit on your side of the table, not the contractor's, and we put what we find in writing.

This work is personal

Good Architect is led by Shea Cullen, a NSW Registered Architect (9748) who also served with the NSW SES at Gosford, where in 2020 she became the unit's first female L3 Flood Rescue Technician (The Volunteer, April 2020). She has seen what water does to people's homes from both sides of the wall, and she would rather you spent your money fixing your building than fighting over it.