A fed up bricklayer has brought to light every homebuyer’s nightmare, pointing out new but badly dilapidated urban apartments.
A video posted to TikTok by user Monkey8u takes viewers on a tour of what he says are “the worst units in Sydney.”
The problems don’t even start in the apartment with the video showing shoddy workmanship around the elevator and crooked doors in the hallway.
The video shows a “finished” bathroom with the shower unsealed and the tiles without grout.
It is unclear where in Sydney the apartment is located.
In a second bathroom, the tiler zooms in on the toilet buttons. The video shows a large, uneven gap between that and the tiles it’s supposed to be flush with.
“Look at the workforce, it’s just garbage,” he exclaimed.
Then he passed some rattling doors covered with uneven patches of paint.
“Wherever you go, it’s like a child did it,” he said.
“This is what you get these days in Sydney.”
The tiler said the construction industry needed to change, and there were plenty of new houses like this one in town.
“They’re taking people’s money and building it up,” he said.
“If people want to build an apartment and take people’s money, there should be some security.”
The installer floated the idea of a one-year cooling-off period after people moved into the apartment.
It is worrying that the video is one of many circulating on social networks.
Australian Society of Construction Consultants President David Roberts believed that since the NSW Government’s Design and Construction Professionals Act came into force earlier this year, it was now more difficult for builders and Developers pass off poor constructions of class two (apartments).
Through a series of measures, the law sought to restore consumer confidence to ensure that apartments were built correctly and to the highest standards.
“The building commissioner’s office is getting bogged down with these dodgy builders and developers who have been wreaking havoc for years,” Roberts told news.com.au.
“There are a multitude of buildings that need to be repaired or are still in trouble since before July last year, when the practitioners’ law came into play.
Roberts said it was ultimately due to poor oversight by subcontractors.
“There is a foreman on site part of the time, but the rest of the time, the helpers are just doing their thing,” he said.
High-profile Australian architect Tone Wheeler wrote in an architecture column in 2019 that the Australian property market had been “inundated” with poorly built apartments.
“The owner corporations try to hide the problems in the hope that the building will not have a bad reputation, so that the owner strata can sell again, at a profit, without the defects being corrected,” he said.
“The buyer is cheated with a poor product, the developer is cheated with a loss of profit, so who benefits? Banks.
“They make money all the time, on the construction loan and on the first and subsequent mortgages.”
Wheeler said selling off plan was the “scourge of building good units.”
“Builders hate it because it cuts into their profits, buyers hate it because they rarely get what they expect.”
In July, Australian building inspector Zeher Khalil went viral for his videos exposing unreliable labor in new homes, most of them in Melbourne.
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