Open home on a Saturday in Sandringham. Forty people come through. Six of them are serious.
Over the following week, those six will each ring a building inspector, and each will pay somewhere between $550 and $900 for a visual, non-invasive assessment of the same roof, the same subfloor, the same 1930s wiring. (Trade Me Property 2024) Five of them will not buy the house.
I know how this feels from the inside. Before my now wife and I bought our first home, we spent nearly three years looking, and we paid to inspect six or seven houses we did not buy. Each report was on a house we wanted. Each one gave us enough confidence to bid. Most of them ended up being confidence about a home somebody else owns.
The obvious reading is that this is waste, and it is. But calling something waste doesn’t explain it, and arrangements that survive this long usually aren’t stupid. They’re load-bearing. So the better question is what the duplication is actually doing.
Why each buyer has to look first
The problem is not that every seller is hiding something. Most are not. It is that the process sells the house before it reveals it.
A house sold at auction in New Zealand is sold unconditionally. The hammer falls and the sale is done: no conditions, no cooling off, no clause that lets you walk away if the inspection turns up rot. So the inspection cannot happen after you agree to buy, the way it does in an ordinary conditional sale. It has to happen before you bid, because bidding is buying. The Real Estate Authority’s advice to auction buyers says exactly this: obtain the building report before auction day. (Real Estate Authority 2019)
Each of the six is therefore doing the sensible, rational thing when they pay for their own certainty, and five of the six have that certainty made worthless by the hammer. The duplication is not carelessness. It is obedience to a clause about when the sale becomes final, a clause nobody standing in the hallway chose and none of them can change. The waste was never inevitable. It was inherited.
And it runs on two axes. The obvious one is one house, many buyers: six people, six reports, one roof. The second axis is the one nobody counts. Because certainty must precede the bid, and most buyers bid on several houses before they win one, the same household pays again and again for houses that end up belonging to someone else. This is normal behaviour, not an edge case: 49% of recent buyers obtained a building inspection report from a certified inspector, per the Real Estate Authority’s 2025 consumer research. (Real Estate Authority 2025) The same house is paid for repeatedly by people who won’t own it. The same buyer pays repeatedly for houses they won’t get. The waste isn’t a line. It’s a grid.
What you are actually buying
This is where the first version of this essay was too neat. I had treated a report as if it were a clean, interchangeable piece of information. It is not.
New Zealand inspections run to NZS 4306:2005. It isn’t law, but it is the benchmark, and it is narrow by design: a visual, non-invasive look at what can be seen without dismantling anything. Two competent inspectors at the same property on the same morning should produce substantially the same findings, because the standard is doing most of the work. (Standards New Zealand 2005) The information is not the scarce part. The information is close to identical every time.
What isn’t identical is who is allowed to rely on it. Reports come wrapped in terms restricting who can lean on the findings. If you didn’t commission it, you generally can’t rely on it, and if you rely on it anyway and something has been missed, you have no claim. The Real Estate Authority says as much about seller-supplied reports: buyers who rely on one generally have no recourse against its inspector, and are advised to get their own. (Real Estate Authority 2026) Some inspectors sell the remedy directly: win the auction and you can upgrade to a reliance letter for a small fee, a document confirming the report can now be legally relied on by you.
That is the whole thing, sitting in plain sight. The inspection is one price. The right to depend on the inspection is a separate price. They can be bought apart from each other, and the industry already knows how. Which means your $700 isn’t buying knowledge about the roof. It is buying a named person who is accountable to you, specifically, if the roof turns out to be wrong. You aren’t buying a document. You’re buying a counterparty.
A counterparty is personal by definition. It can’t be inherited by the next person standing in the hallway. That isn’t the market failing. That is the product working exactly as designed. The failure sits one step up: no party has both the incentive and the mechanism to fund, stand behind, and share the first reliable account of the house. The inspector is paid per instruction and limits liability to their client. The seller isn’t rewarded for paying for a report buyers can’t safely use. The agent is there to sell the property. Everyone is behaving rationally, so trust becomes private, repetitive work: a coordination cost quietly privatised onto whoever is standing in the hallway, and kept there by the rule that says be certain before you bid.
Somebody already ran the experiment
Britain ran it properly, and it failed in the most instructive way possible. From 2007 the Home Information Pack required sellers to assemble the paperwork before listing, with a condition report as the intended centrepiece. More than nine in ten buyers said they wanted information about a house’s condition. Fewer than one in six trusted it when the seller was the one supplying it. The condition report was quietly made voluntary, and the scheme was scrapped in 2010. The government’s own verdict was that nobody trusted them. (UK Department for Communities and Local Government 2010)
Scotland took the same idea and made it hold. Since 2008 most homes there cannot come to market without a Home Report: a Single Survey, an energy report, and a seller-completed questionnaire, prepared once and shown to every interested buyer. Crucially, a buyer can rely on the Single Survey, with a route to damages for material mistakes. (Scottish Government 2026) The Australian Capital Territory does something related: the seller must include a recent building-and-compliance inspection report in the sale contract, recovers its cost from the buyer at completion, and the law provides a remedy if a supplied report is materially false, misleading, or negligently prepared. (Australian Capital Territory Parliamentary Counsel 2025)
Read together, the three experiments say something precise. The first account of a house does not have to be privately recreated by every potential buyer; it can travel with the sale. But it only travels if someone answers the question the HIP died of, which was never a paperwork question: who is accountable to the person relying on the report? Information without a counterparty is exactly what British buyers refused to trust.
What would have to change
Less than you’d think, which is the frustrating part. The inspection already happens once. The findings are already standardised. Reliance is already a separable, priceable thing that inspectors issue on request. Every piece is sitting there in the current system. What’s missing is a place where a report that already exists can be found, and where reliance can be bought by whoever needs it, priced to reflect the fact that the walking-around part is already done. New Zealand could also change the rule itself, the way Scotland did. Until it does, a market answer has to work inside the rule.
I should be honest that this isn’t an original observation. BuyersRep already runs a version of it: a discounted non-reliance report shared across bidders, upgraded to full reliance by whoever wins. (BuyersRep 2026) So the model is legal, it works, and somebody got there first. What doesn’t exist yet is the boring infrastructure underneath: reports findable by address, nationally, across any inspector, with reliance as a line item you can buy rather than a favour you have to know to ask for. That is the part I’m building. It’s called Final.
The house only needs looking at once. Everything after that is paperwork.