The insurance product giving Australian property buyers surety
Property is a key pathway to wealth. A new product ensures you get what you paid for.
4 min
Following significant building industry reforms in NSW in recent years, the insurance industry has entered the apartment sector, offering insurance on quality building projects, for quality trustworthy producers. As the NSW Government under the administration of the Office of NSW Building Commissioner leads building regulatory change, the need for commercial solutions supporting consumers and those trusted building practitioners could not be timelier. Enter Latent Defects Insurance (LDI). Here’s what you need to know about this game changing product.
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What is Latent Defects Insurance?
Latent Defects Insurance (LDI)is an insurance product available around the world for decades but only now available in Australia. It provides insurance protection for structural defects and waterproofing defects in apartment buildings for a period of 10 years after completion of construction. This is a protection unavailable to consumers or industry previously, and it provides unequalled consumer confidence in the quality of building for purchasers while eliminating the destructive and growing litigation business model operating across the construction industry.
Why would an insurer offer this cover given the stories of poor building?
LDI changes the way building insurance is offered. Rather than reliance on history and in house certification, LDI requires a developer and builder to employ an independent inspection service all the way through construction. This inspection service must be approved by the insurer and the scope of inspections agreed before construction commences. The inspection program is detailed and includes design review, construction inspection, waterproofing inspection and testing among many aspects of assurance. This gives the insurer, the construction participants, and consumers much greater surety of compliance with standards and codes, safety, and delivery, enabling an insurance security to be offered after completion of the building project.
Won’t this insurance only add to the already strained affordability pressures?
No. In NSW, a developer is required to provide a 2 percent financial bond to NSW Fair Trading at completion securing the quality of building for a period of two years. This cost, the 2 percent bond is charged to the construction cost and therefore onto the purchaser of units. If that bond is returned to the developer at the end of two years, it is rarely if ever passed back to those purchasers. LDI is an alternative to the Strata Bond, meaning that the developer has a choice of providing the two-year bond or a 10-year insurance policy. The current experience for the cost of the LDI product is it is priced at approximately 1.5 percent. This means LDI is in fact cheaper than the current bond and reduces the impost on purchasers.
How does this benefit consumers and the building industry?
Latent Defects is a 10-year insurance cover with cover at the building value or $50 million. The strata bond is a two-year protection valued at 2 percent of the cost of building. The limitations on the value and time offered by the strata bond are and have been catastrophic for many consumers. It also brings about significant litigation risk for developers, builders, and financiers. Latent Defects Insurance is offered on a strict liability basis. That means there is no need to find fault to enable a claim, eradicating the litigation business model that costs all participants tens and often hundreds of thousands of dollars and many years of time and frustration.
Why would a developer not elect to purchase Latent Defects Insurance?
The product is only new to Australia, being offered in the open market in the past 12-months. Resilience Insurance is the first to offer this product. The insurance is offered selectively to developers and builders with quality building histories meaning those with a history of association to consumer harms or poor quality outputs will either not be able to obtain the cover. Other developers have relied on the return of the 2 percent bond in their own profitability models, taking that benefit to their business returns over tangible, transparent delivery and security in favour of their clients.
How do you ensure your property is protected by Latent Defects Insurance
Prospective purchasers should be asking their developer in the sales display suite if their property will have Latent Defects Insurance. There is already strong evidence and media reporting of consumers moving purchase decisions on this exact point. Ask your developer and their agents if you are getting a property with two years limited protection or 10 years full insurance protection. For developers, the security provided means that the risk of litigation is eliminated.
CEO of Resilience Insurance, Corey Nugent says:
Latent Defects Insurance is a vital protection for consumers and building practitioners changing the way building outputs are overseen and delivered. Ensuring quality and backing that product with full insurance protection enables apartment buyers to have confidence in their investment, without the fear of catastrophic future exposures.
Supporting the significant and necessary regulatory reform in NSW, Resilience Insurance has been able to offer this product benefiting confidence, transparency and trust in quality building product. Providing insurance protection for the benefit of apartment owners, removing the litigation risk for building industry participants and ensuring our apartment buildings are delivered to a quality benchmark are just some of the benefits of Latent Defects Insurance.
Mirzaian is a senior director within CBRE’s Development NSW business, operating across the company’s Western Sydney and North Sydney offices
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Edge Design Consultants has remained a relatively small studio, allowing Rizk to maintain personal involvement across its projects.
4 min
The most convincing luxury interiors rarely need to announce their value.
Their appeal is revealed more gradually: in the weight of a door, the texture of a natural material, the proportion of the furniture or the way lighting changes the mood of a room after dark.
It is this quieter expression of luxury that has shaped the work of Charlie Rizk, founder and design director of Sydney studio Edge Design Consultants.
Established in 2006, the boutique practice works across residential and commercial interiors, offering services that range from architectural interior design and material selection to bespoke furniture, furnishing and final styling.
Its portfolio spans family homes, waterfront retreats, commercial workplaces and apartments within some of Sydney’s most prominent residential buildings. But according to the studio’s philosophy, the common thread is not a readily identifiable aesthetic.
Instead, it is an emphasis on longevity, personalisation and a close relationship between designer and client.
From the salon to the design studio
Rizk’s route into interior design was unconventional.
Before establishing Edge Design Consultants, he founded the Sydney hair salon Escapadehfb. While the two businesses operate in different creative fields, Rizk’s early career gave him experience in interpreting highly personal client briefs.
That ability to listen — and to distinguish between what a client initially requests and how they ultimately want to feel — became central to his work in interiors.
A client may arrive with a collection of reference images, favourite colours or individual pieces of furniture. The designer’s role is not simply to assemble those elements. It is to identify the underlying preference connecting them and translate it into a coherent environment.
That distinction becomes particularly important in bespoke residential design, where the success of a room is determined by more than its appearance in photographs.
The interior must accommodate routines, collections, entertaining, children, pets, privacy and storage. Materials must also be selected according to how they will perform after years of use.
A deliberately boutique model
Edge Design Consultants has remained a relatively small studio, allowing Rizk to maintain personal involvement across its projects.
For clients, that structure offers continuity. Architectural detailing, fixtures, finishes, furniture and styling can be developed as parts of the same design narrative rather than commissioned as disconnected stages.
The studio’s full-service model can begin with spatial planning and architectural interiors before progressing through mood boards, material selections, custom furniture and the final installation.
This continuity is particularly valuable on complex homes involving architects, builders, specialist trades, suppliers and landscape designers. Decisions made at the beginning of a project can affect everything that follows, from the dimensions of a custom sofa to the placement of lighting, power and joinery.
Bringing the interior designer into the process early can help prevent decorative decisions from being imposed on a largely completed building.
It also creates opportunities for furniture, art and objects to inform the architecture itself.
The case against a signature look
Many successful designers become associated with a recognisable palette or recurring visual device. Edge takes a less prescriptive position.
The studio’s work includes warm, layered family interiors as well as more restrained contemporary apartments and sharper commercial spaces. Its stated priorities are durability, considered materials and an understanding of the way each space will be occupied.
This does not mean abandoning a point of view. Rather, the designer’s sensibility is expressed through proportion, editing and consistency instead of a formula repeated from one project to another.
For affluent homeowners, this can be an important distinction. A heavily trend-driven interior may look current when completed but quickly reveal the moment in which it was designed.
An enduring home needs enough character to feel individual without becoming hostage to a short-lived fashion.
Natural stone, timber, metalwork and well-made furniture can provide that foundation, but material expense alone does not create permanence. The detailing, installation and relationship between the materials matter just as much.
Designing from the building out
Edge’s published portfolio includes residential projects in Pymble, Epping, North Rocks, Strathfield, Pyrmont and Wagstaffe, along with the furnishing and styling of a residence in Crown Sydney. A Pymble residence (below) was featured on Channel Nine’s Australia’s Best House in 2023.
The scope varies between projects.
Some commissions involve complete architectural interior design, furniture and styling. Others focus on furnishing an existing residence, where the challenge is to introduce identity without altering the underlying architecture.
A penthouse, for example, may already possess exceptional views, finishes and proportions. The designer’s task is then to create intimacy, establish visual rhythm and ensure the furniture remains appropriately scaled to the volume of the rooms.
A freestanding family home presents different considerations. Storage, circulation, durability and the relationship between indoor and outdoor areas may take precedence over creating a formal sense of arrival.
The best result is not necessarily the most dramatic. It is the one in which the architecture, finishes, furniture and objects feel as though they were always intended to coexist.
Luxury as a personal experience
After 20 years, Edge Design Consultants sits within a design market transformed by social media and unprecedented access to international references.
Clients can now identify furniture, stone, lighting and interiors from around the world before their first conversation with a designer. That access can broaden a brief, but it can also produce an overwhelming collection of competing ideas.
The designer’s role is increasingly one of curation: deciding what belongs, what should be removed and which references can be translated convincingly into an Australian home.
For Rizk, the boutique scale of Edge allows that process to remain personal.
The studio’s version of luxury is therefore not defined by a single material, brand or visual signature. It lies in the time spent understanding a client, the care with which each element is selected and the sense that the completed space belongs specifically to the people living within it.
Fact box
- Designer: Charlie Rizk
- Role: Founder and design director
- Studio: Edge Design Consultants
- Established: 2006
- Location: Sydney, NSW
- Services: Architectural interior design, spatial planning, mood boards, fixtures and finishes, bespoke furniture, furnishing and styling
- Project types: Luxury residences, apartments, penthouses and boutique commercial interiors
- Selected locations: Pymble, Epping, North Rocks, Strathfield, Pyrmont, Wagstaffe, Macquarie Park and Crown Sydney
- Selected media: Australia’s Best House, Kanebridge Quarterly and Robb Report Australia
- Website: edgedesignconsultants.com.au
- Instagram: @edge_design_consultants
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