Serving the greater Auckland Area since 1988
If you suspect you may have a problem with leaks and therefore possibly damage, consider making your first port of call to the Weathertight Homes Resolution Service. This service is run by central government (taxpayer funded) and it costs nothing to get an "eligibility" report.
If your house was built less than 10 years ago, or the alteration/extension was, you may have an eligible claim. Note that if the work was completed more than 10 years ago, you wont. And that cut off date really is from when the work was completed (which might be long before the CCC, if any, was issued). You can get the forms to apply for an eligibility report on line and in due course an assessor will turn up to have a look. This person will be trying to figure out:
If the answers to all three questions is yes, you move on to the next step - getting a full assessment, which does involve paying about $500. This is all explained on the govt website. The point is - for $500 you get a really good report, the sort of report you would have to pay a consultant anything from three to eight grand for.
Of course there are drawbacks too, and they have to be balanced against the financial savings. The first one is - fairly early on in the process, a notice goes on the property file. And once there, it doesn't go away. The best you can hope for is (eventually) it gets rendered irrelevant by the layers of subsequent documents showing how everything has been fixed.
The second one is that the WHRS Assessor doesn't work for you. (S)he is paid for by the government and is working for them - this person is not "your" expert. You basically just have to let them get on with it and wait for the report. Once you get that report (assuming the claim is eligible) you will be put on the fast track to a dispute tribunal where (hopefully) other parties may be present who will be persuaded to part with some $ to help you fix your house.
A good perspective on this process from the home owner's side is to be found on the Leaky Homes Action Group website.
There are plenty of houses which are well over then years old and show few if any signs of decay. Unfortunately, an increasingly large number of people are only finding the first evidence of leaks / damage after the house has already passed the ten year cut off date. The difficulty with this is that it may be almost impossible to persuade any one else to pay for remediation if the original work was done more than 10 years prior to anyone noticing a problem. Sometimes this can come down to a matter of days. So if your house is coming up to that 10 year deadline, perhaps you should think seriously about the eligibility report - because, at the moment, lodging a claim "stops the clock".
This can lead to a situation where a builder has thrown his celebratory party 10 years after he finished a house, only to be told a year or two later he has to turn up to Court because someone had lodged a claim within the ten year period, and it took a while before anyone told him. I have seen this happen.
However, even if you don't get to the Weathertight Services Group (govt) or lodge a claim elsewhere within that 10 year period, you probably still need to know how to fix your house. Perhaps even more so if you are going to have to pay for everything yourself. In this situation you again need a building consultant - and most of the Assessors who contract to the government also work privately, so you could get one of those, or you can choose from the several larger companies specialising in this area.
The Leaky Homes Action Group for the owner's perspective on the WHRS
And see Lighthouse NZ Ltd for what grew out of it - seriously good advice for a reasonable cost
Apply for an Eligibility Report from the Weathertight Services