Roofers in Newcastle

No, and this is the one place where the two trades part company. When the Home Building Act 1989 draws up specialist work, its first limb reads plumbing and drainage work other than roof plumbing work — and the Home Building Regulation 2014 then files roof plumbing among the trade categories of residential building work instead. Residential building work is where the threshold lives: a licence becomes necessary once labour plus materials, valued at what they would reasonably cost, pass $5,000. That number falls out of reading the Act's definition alongside clause 12 of the Regulation. No official page says work under $5,000 needs no licence — NSW states the requirement positively and never the reverse.

It follows the covering. Roof plumbing covers guttering, downpipes, roof flashing and roof coverings, but the Home Building Act 1989 expressly excludes coverings of non-metallic tiles and slates, glass, concrete, timber and timber products, thatching, and malthoid, bituminous or similar membrane material. Tiled and slate roofs therefore fall to the roof tiling and roof slating categories, whose scopes in Schedule 4 cover fixing the tiles or slates plus the associated flashing, valley, sarking and batten work. A business may hold more than one of these. The categories on the licence record are the thing to match to your roof, and the register shows them as Roof Plumber, Roof Tiler and Roof Slater.

Six years or two, depending on the defect. Section 18E of the Home Building Act 1989 sets a warranty period of six years for a breach resulting in a major defect and two years in any other case, running from completion of the work. A major defect has to sit in a major element — the Act's list of major elements includes load-bearing components essential to the building's stability and names roofs among them, alongside fire safety systems and waterproofing — and it has to cause, or be likely to cause, inability to use the building for its intended purpose, destruction, or a threat of collapse. So a failed roof structure and a leaking gutter joint are not on the same clock. Section 18G adds that these warranties cannot be excluded by the contract.

Almost certainly the owners corporation's, but the reason matters more than the answer. The Strata Schemes Management Act 2015 puts a standing duty on an owners corporation to properly maintain and keep in a state of good and serviceable repair the common property. The statutory Common Property Memorandum then allocates guttering and membranes to the owners corporation. Nothing about that is automatic. The Act says by-laws may adopt the memorandum, which leaves a scheme that never adopted it governed by whatever its own by-laws happen to say. Where the duty is breached, an owner may recover reasonably foreseeable loss as damages for breach of statutory duty, within six years of first becoming aware of the loss.

Once the contract price crosses $20,000, yes. Section 92 of the Home Building Act 1989 wants two things in place before a single dollar is demanded or received: a live contract of insurance, and a certificate of it in your hands. Subsection (3) then lifts the whole duty wherever the price does not exceed the prescribed figure, which clause 53 of the Regulation puts at $20,000 including GST. A price landing exactly on $20,000 therefore falls outside the duty; a dollar more brings it back. Section 92(4) closes the obvious workaround: where the same parties enter two or more contracts to carry out work in stages, the contract price is taken to be the sum of them.