The home building dispute resolution service was established to provide a quick and cost free way of resolving disputes between consumers, builders and tradespeople.

During the 2007/08, financial year:

• 6224 complaints relating to home building were lodged with Fair Trading
• 4500 complaints were resolved:
  • 2480 by staff at Fair Trading Centres
  • 2020 by Fair Trading Inspectors
• 1091 complaints were appropriately referred onto the Consumer, Trader and Tenancy Tribunal.

The remaining (633) matters were:

• withdrawn, or
• outside statutory time limits, or
• outside Fair Trading's jurisdiction, or
• involved a trader that could not be located, or
• one of 307 unresolved matters still being investigated.

Complaint statistics for the 2008/09 financial year have been graphed and are provided below. They present three complaint perspectives:

• the cause of the defect at the centre of the complaint
• the type of defect at the centre of the complaint
• the class of licenced contractor responsible for the work at the centre of the complaint.

In addition, if trends are identified against previous years (ie. whether the numbers are rising or falling), these are included.

This data is provided to raise consumer awareness of the potential pitfalls of home building; to assist training providers identify areas of need and to help the home building industry better manage risk.

Complaints by cause

The various causes of complaints are detailed in the document below, which graphically shows that poor workmanship is the major cause of most home building complaints.

View or download Home building complaints by cause as at December 2009 in PDF format (size: 62kb).

Complaints by defect

While most complaints are caused by poor workmanship, poor workmanship can results in many different defects. The document below shows complaints by the variety of defects that have been reported. It also shows that there are three main areas of defect that regularly result in complaints.

View or download Home building complaints by defect as at December 2009 in PDF format (size: 58kb).

Complaints by licence class

The document below shows which licence class is more likely to have a complaint made against them.

While over half of all complaints are shown to be made against building contractors, it must be remembered that the scope of work undertaken by a builder is on average, more complex than work undertaken by other licence classes.

View or download Home builidng complaints by licence class as at December 2009 in PDF format (size: 83kb).