Australia poor apartment builds: Tradie takes to TikTok to call out Sydney apartment

A fed-up tiler has exposed every homebuyer’s nightmare, pointing out brand new but severely underdone city apartments.

A video posted to TikTok by user Monkey8u takes viewers on a tour of what he claims are “the worst units in Sydney”.

The problems don’t even start in the apartment with the video showing shoddy workmanship around the elevator and wonky doors in the hallway.

The video shows a “finished” bathroom with the shower left unsealed, and the tiles without grout.

It is unclear where in Sydney the apartment is located.

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In a second bathroom, the tiler zooms in on the toilet buttons. The video shows a large, uneven gap between that and the tiles it is supposed to sit flush with.

“Look at the workmanship – it’s just f**king garbage,” he exclaimed.

He then moved on to some rattly doors covered in uneven blotches of paint.

“Everywhere you go, it’s like a kid done it,” he said

“This is what you get these days in Sydney.”

The tiler said the building industry needed to change, and there were numerous new homes around the city just like it.

“They’re taking people’s money and building it s**t,” he said.

“If people want to build an apartment and take people’s money there should be some security.”

The tiler floated the idea of a one-year cooling off period after people move into the apartment.

Worryingly, the video is one of many circulating social media.

President of the Australian Society of Building Consultants David Roberts believed since the NSW Government’s Design and Building Practitioners Act came into affect earlier this year, it was now harder for builders and developers to pass off poor class two (apartments) builds.

Through a range of measures, the Act sought to restore consumer confidence to make sure that apartments being built properly and to the highest of standards.

“The building commissioner's office is getting stuck into these dodgy builders and developers that have been wreaking havoc for years,” Mr Roberts told news.com.au.

“There is a multitude of buildings that need to be fixed or are still having issues from prior to July last year when the practitioners act came into play.

Mr Roberts said ultimately it came down to poor supervision over subcontractors.

“There’s a foreman on site some of the time but the rest of the time, subbies are just doing their own thing,” he said.

High-profile Australian architect Tone Wheeler wrote in a architecture column in 2019 that the Australian housing market had become “flooded” with poorly built apartments.

“The owners’ corporations try to hide the problems in the hope that the building doesn’t get a bad reputation, so that the strata owners can sell again, at a profit, without the defects being addressed,” he said.

“The purchaser is dudded with a poor product, the developer is dudded with a loss of profit, so who benefits? Banks.

“They make money at every turn, in the construction loan and in the first and subsequent mortgages.”

Mr Wheeler said selling off-plan was the “scourge of building good units”.

“The builders hate it as it lowers their profit, purchasers hate it as they rarely get what they are expecting.”

In July Aussie building inspector Zeher Khalil’s went viral for his videos exposing the dodgy workmanship of tradies on new homes – most of them in Melbourne.

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