Preparing for MBIS: what an Owners' Corporation should have ready
A notice starts a clock. Most of the delay that follows is not inspection time — it is time spent finding documents, arranging access and reaching a decision. Here is what to have ready first.
An MBIS notice does not usually fail on the inspection. It fails on everything around it: nobody can find the last set of approved plans, the roof hatch key is with a contractor who left three years ago, and the Owners' Corporation cannot get a quorum until the next general meeting.
Get the paperwork together before you appoint anyone
A Registered Inspector will ask for the building's history, and the search is almost always slower than expected. Start with approved plans and any occupation permit, records of previous inspections or repairs, past correspondence with the Buildings Department, and the details of any works carried out under the Minor Works Control System.
Where records are missing, say so early. A gap that is known about is a scoping question; a gap discovered mid-inspection is a delay.
Settle access while you are still waiting
Statutory inspection covers external elements, common parts, structural elements and drainage — which means roofs, lightwells, plant rooms and, in some buildings, individual flats. Every one of those is an access arrangement, and each is slower than it sounds.
Identify now who holds keys, which areas need a resident's permission, and which need notice to a tenant. Drone survey removes the scaffolding from the façade, but it does not remove the need to reach a podium roof.
Understand what the appointment actually is
The notice requires the appointment of a Registered Inspector, who carries out the prescribed inspection and supervises any repairs found necessary. That appointment is the legal step. Everything else — survey method, drone or scaffold, thermal or visual — is how the inspection gets done, not whether it counts.
This matters when comparing quotes. A low price for capture is not a price for the statutory obligation, and the two are easy to confuse when they appear on the same page.
Plan the decision, not just the inspection
The inspection produces findings; the findings produce repairs; the repairs need funding and a resolution. For an Owners' Corporation that sequence usually spans more than one meeting. Building the meeting calendar backwards from the notice deadline is the single most useful thing a committee can do in the first week.
Opulence Management carries out MBIS inspections and supervises the resulting works. Where the façade is suited to it, we survey with drone capture and AI-assisted defect analysis rather than scaffolding, which shortens the survey without changing the statutory route.
