A growing number of residents understand why an engineering home inspection (bedek bayit) matters for their home. Construction defects in an apartment are only useful to know about if the residents know about them, so they can demand precise, fully detailed repairs from the contractor.
Some residents wonder whether it is even worth it: maybe their apartment has no defects at all. Then they call in the engineer, pay for it out of pocket, money that is already stretched thin by everything involved in buying and furnishing a new apartment, and get nothing for it.
For residents on the fence, it helps to know that repair costs are estimated from price lists updated every month, and that almost any real scale of defects will justify what the engineering inspection costs. Arad Bedek Bayit's own interest is in raising construction quality across the country: we want to encourage good contractors and give their work a stamp of approval.
The reality on the ground, inspection after inspection, is that most apartments do have construction and planning defects, often quite a few of them. Some people ask how residents managed for years without an engineer's inspection, when today it seems so necessary. The answer comes down to a few things.
First, consumer awareness has grown enormously. Today we expect fair value for our money, and we hold contractors to what they promised us. Second, construction itself has changed in a way that produces more defects: far more subcontractors are involved than in the past, and the chain of delegated work has grown longer.
From the main contractor down to the tile layer setting the gaps between tiles on site, a good number of subcontractors sit in between, which makes coordinating their work, and overseeing its quality, that much harder.
The engineers of Arad Bedek Bayit, led by building engineer Ron Arad, whom courts appoint as their own expert on construction defects. The company has been inspecting apartments and buildings since 2001. Engineer Ron Arad · More about the company