The warranties apply
whether or not you write them down.

For residential building work over $12,000 on some residential buildings in the ACT, the builder must hold a residential building insurance policy or a fidelity certificate before work commences, and the home owner should obtain a copy for their own records. Home owners warranty insurance in the ACT covers only up to $10,000 for deposits, so the cover is narrow and the copy of the certificate the owner holds matters.

Alongside the insurance requirement, residential building work over $12,000 carries statutory warranties under the Building Act 2004 (ACT). These apply even if they are not stated in the contract: broadly, the work must be carried out properly, skilfully and in accordance with the approved plans. You cannot contract out of them, and a client can rely on them whether or not the contract mentions them.

What the statutory warranties cover, and what they don’t

• The warranties require the work to be carried out properly, skilfully and in accordance with the approved plans.
• Structural and non-structural elements have different warranty periods, so the tail on the work is not uniform.
• The warranties do not apply to items such as paving, fences, retaining walls, outdoor pools, ponds and antennas.

Who appoints the certifier

In the ACT the landowner must appoint the building certifier, and the contract must not give the builder the right to appoint the certifier. If a contract you are asked to sign, or one you issue, purports to hand that appointment to the builder, it is out of step with the ACT requirement and should be corrected before signing.

A note on currency: the figures above, the $12,000 thresholds for the insurance requirement and for the statutory warranties, and the $10,000 deposit cover limit, are drawn from an ACT building contracts fact sheet. These thresholds and limits should be re-verified against current ACT regulations before you rely on them, as they change over time. This is general information, not legal or financial advice.

Nothing in a software platform changes the ACT rules, and none of it is insurance. What software changes is whether the records these requirements run on exist when you need them. Every pressure point above is documentary: holding the certificate copy the owner should have, showing what was built and to which approved plans, keeping variations clean so the job you delivered is the job on paper, and answering a warranty question from files rather than memory across different structural and non-structural periods.

A platform that documents claims and variations against each job, keeps costs and commitments tied to the work, and holds the job’s documents in one place is quietly building your evidence file as a by-product of normal work. Keeping cost and cashflow visible also helps the business stay solvent, which is the surest way to keep a warranty question from ever becoming a claim against a builder who is no longer around to answer it.