You’ve found the property. The bones are good and the price works. What the contract doesn’t always tell you is if every part of that house was ever approved to be there.
Unapproved structures are common enough on the Central Coast that assuming a property is clean is the mistake, not the exception. Most of the time it’s minor: a deck or a carport nobody bothered to get signed off. Sometimes it’s bigger than that, and the consequences follow you well past settlement.
Buyer beware isn’t a scare campaign; it’s just the reality of buying on the Coast where a lot of renovating happens without anyone telling the Council.
What Counts as Unapproved
Not every unapproved item carries the same weight. A structure can be approved to exist but not approved as a separate dwelling, which usually means it’s liveable but can’t be rented out on its own title. That’s a different problem to a structure that was never approved at all, where insurance won’t necessarily cover you, and in rare cases, a tenant can come back and query rent paid on an illegal arrangement.
Small stuff like an unapproved deck, carport or garden shed sits at the low end of the risk scale, mostly because nobody’s meant to be living in them and, if they need to be removed, will not incur too much cost or lost value. The moment a structure has a kitchen, a bathroom and a bedroom for someone to live in, this becomes much more serious.
A Roofline That Didn’t Add Up
One property I looked at for a client had a front deck enclosed on two sides. One side became a dining nook off the entry. The other was bolted onto the main bedroom and turned into an ensuite. Whoever did the work did it well. It looked professional, and most buyers walking through would never have questioned it.
The roofline gave it away. Because the space used to be an open deck, the new rooms raked in height from front to back, from 2.4 metres down to 2.1 metres. Habitable spaces like that need a minimum 2.4 metre ceiling under the National Construction Code, so the low end of that slope fell short. Council could treat that as not habitable at all.
If that happened, a buyer who thought they were paying for a three-bedroom, two-bathroom home could end up with a three-bedroom, one-bathroom home, and the money spent on that renovation would be gone if council required the works to be reverted.
What a Building Information Certificate Really Does
When something like this comes up, most people assume there’s a simple fix: get it approved after the fact. There isn’t. The only real option is a Building Information Certificate, and it’s worth understanding what that really does before anyone relies on one.
A Building Information Certificate doesn’t approve a structure; it stops council from taking action to repair, alter or demolish it for seven years. It costs a few hundred dollars in application fees alone through Central Coast Council, though that can climb higher if council asks for extra reports or a formal Development Application. If council decides a structure isn’t safe or doesn’t meet requirements, they can refuse to issue the certificate, and removal is still on the table.
The House That Was Never Fully Approved
In one of the most extreme cases I’ve seen, the seller didn’t disclose that the building never received the final occupation certificate. We only found out because we checked everything during the cooling-off period. The build was around five or six years old, on an ordinary residential street with other homes all around it. The house itself had never been fully approved.
What had happened was straightforward enough. They knocked down the old house and built the new one. The builder got about 95 per cent of the way through before a dispute with the owners stopped the job. Every other box had been ticked. The one thing that never happened was the final occupation certificate.
By the time this came up, too much time had passed for the owners to lodge that paperwork properly. The only option left was a Building Information Certificate. My clients weren’t comfortable relying on one for an entire house, so we walked away and bought something else. The agent had to disclose the issue to every buyer after us, and the property eventually sold at a discount.
How Common This Really Is
Unapproved structures aren’t rare on the Central Coast. The properties that catch buyers out are rarely the obvious ones. They’re the ones that look finished and ordinary.
It’s the kind of detail that shaped a recent purchase in Gorokan, where an unapproved studio was one reason we walked away from the first property and found a better one down the road.
If you’re getting close to making an offer, that’s exactly when a second set of eyes matters most – the kind that caught both examples above before they became a problem. Checking what’s really approved on a property is part of what I do before I ever recommend one to a client, and it’s a conversation worth having before you sign anything, not after. Feel free to reach out.
Important note: This article contains general commentary only and does not constitute legal or building advice. Please consult a qualified conveyancer, solicitor or building certifier before making any decisions based on the above.
