The Premises for Not Being On Premises: The Case for Virtual Building Inspections

Abstract

In Australia, building surveyors and inspectors perform the statutory duty of carrying out mandatory inspections. Some of these duties involve making firm decisions with serious implications. In recent years, at least two life-threatening cases against government officials have occurred; they involved a building inspector and an environmental officer. The increasing complexity of building inspections, in which building surveyors/inspectors operate in hostile environments, requires radical rethinking around the need for in-person inspections. The state of Victoria is on the cusp of making major changes that could reassign the majority of building inspection work currently undertaken by private building surveyors and inspectors to be under the council in the next 1–2 years. The additional workload for the council and increased strictness by them makes it all the more pertinent to consider the possibility of technological aids. To address present and emerging concerns around the safety and inefficiency of in-person inspections, this study explains the merit behind the proposed adoption of reality capture as a collaborative virtual preinspection tool that commences with ubiquitous reality capture for virtual preinspection and concludes with a mandatory in-person inspection.