Home builders in New South Wales

New South Wales works differently to Victoria. Planning controls come through a Local Environmental Plan made by each council, so the instrument governing your block has a name and a year — the Ku-ring-gai Local Environmental Plan 2015, for instance. We read the NSW ePlanning spatial data, so a NSW area page names the actual LEP rather than a generic 'planning scheme'.

NSW also maps heritage in unusual depth, distinguishing individual items from whole conservation areas. That distinction matters enormously for a knockdown rebuild: your own house need not be listed for conservation area controls to reach it. Where we hold that data we show the counts for the suburb, plus acid sulfate soils where they are mapped.

Building work in New South Wales is regulated by NSW Fair Trading, which licenses builders and maintains the public licence register. Licence classes in NSW are specific: a licence that permits alterations and additions does not necessarily permit a new dwelling, and that is a distinction worth checking yourself rather than assuming.

NSW also runs a statutory insurance scheme for residential building work above a threshold, which responds where a builder dies, disappears or becomes insolvent. Given the current rate of construction insolvencies, understanding what your contract is covered by is not an academic exercise. Fair Trading is the authority on thresholds and how a claim is made.

We run those checks before a builder is listed and publish the date. Repeat any of them yourself — we would rather you did.