Buying Property is like buying a Pig in a Poke

As you walk around a nice new house, it's easy to be seduced by the glossy surface veneer into thinking you don't need to have a building survey done. After all you can always sue the builder or the insurance. Yeah, sure.
The Sunday Telegraph recounts the story of an owner who bought into a large modern appartment block built in 2001, in which serious structural faults were found. By then the builder had, of course, gone into liquidation. It cost $400,000 in legal fees to recover $1.2M in repair costs. The story doesn't say whether the owner was an original owner, or bought in later, in which case the content of the strata sinking fund would be very relevant - the person he bought from might well have sold simply to get out from under the problems, leaving the new owner to pay.