30 JANUARY 2020
Developers, builders and certifiers will be rated on their record of building failures, finances, complaints, insurance claims and other such factors under a new tool being developed by NSW Building Commissioner David Chandler and data company Equifax.
“This will start to join up the players,” Mr Chandler told The Australian Financial Review. “When you look into a project that is about to be developed, it’s useful to people like regulators, to people like banks, to people like insurers and people who might be purchasing off the plan, to have some sort of view of what is the composite riskiness of the players who are about to make the project.
Consumer advocates welcome the idea. “It’s part of a jigsaw that’s starting to come together to re-regulate and recalibrate the industry,” said Karen Stiles, chief executive of the Owners Corporation Network. “This is a really powerful tool for the building commissioner to identify risky developments and be able to act on that before they become the problem of the innocent purchasers.”