A bloke at Balgownie met me at the door with a manila folder, which is never a good sign, and inside it were three annual termite inspection reports going back three years. All three said no live activity found. He had just pulled the washing machine out to chase a leak and found the bottom of the laundry wall doing that papery, blistered thing that plasterboard does when there's something behind it.
His question, reasonably, was how three inspections had missed it.
They hadn't, quite. Two of the three reports had a line in the back half about the laundry: access to the subfloor was restricted by stored goods, that area could not be inspected, recommend clearing and re-inspecting. He'd read the front page, seen the words he was looking for, and filed it.
That's not me defending the industry. It's the single most useful thing I can tell a homeowner about these reports, so it's worth going through properly.
What you're actually buying
A timber pest inspection is a visual inspection of accessible areas. Both of those words are doing a lot of work.
The Australian Standard that governs it, AS 4349.3, sets out what the minimum requirements for a timber pest inspection are, and it describes itself as covering visual inspection and reporting. Nothing in it involves opening up a wall. I don't cut into your plasterboard, I don't lift your tiles, I don't pull your kitchen apart, and I don't move your furniture or your stored boxes.
Visual means I'm looking at surfaces, and using a moisture meter and sounding, tapping timber and listening for the hollow, to infer what's behind them. That inference is good. It is not the same as seeing.
Accessible means the parts of the house I can safely get to on the day. Roof void, if there's a manhole and I can move through it. Subfloor, if there's a hatch and clearance and it isn't flooded. Skirtings, architraves, window reveals, wet areas, the grounds, the fence line, the stumps.
So the honest translation of "no live activity found" is: on this day, in the parts of this building I could see and reach, using visual methods, I found no live termites. That is a genuinely valuable sentence. It is not the sentence "your house does not have termites", and no inspection of any price buys you that one.
The bits nobody can see
Concealed framing inside a cavity wall. Timbers behind tiled bathroom walls, which is a classic, because it's wet and dark and nobody looks. The underside of a slab. Inside a hollow brick pier. Behind built-in robes and kitchen cabinetry that's fixed to the wall. Under vinyl and floating floors. Inside a flat roof with no void to crawl.
Termites in this part of the world are subterranean. They come up from soil, they build mud galleries in the dark, and the entire evolutionary point of the way they work is not being seen. A colony can be working inside a wall for a long time while the paint on the outside of it looks fine.
What a good inspection actually does is read the conditions around all that. Moisture where there shouldn't be moisture. A mud lead on the inside of a pier. Bridging over the top of the ant capping. Garden beds built up above the damp course. Timber in contact with soil. That's the real skill, and it's why the termite inspection is worth having annually rather than being a formality.
Access is the homeowner's half of the job
This is the part I'd most like people to take away, because it's free and it's entirely in your control.
The subfloor at Balgownie had about two-thirds of a garage's worth of stuff in it: paint tins, an old cot, boxes of tiles, a dismantled bed frame, all of it pushed in through the hatch over about a decade. The inspector before me couldn't get past it. He wrote that down. Nothing he could have done differently.
When you book an inspection, the difference between a thorough job and a heavily qualified one is usually decided the week before, by you:
Clear a path in the subfloor, or at least clear the perimeter so someone can get around the edge where the piers and the ant capping are. Make sure the manhole isn't painted shut, isn't behind a wardrobe, and has something under it to stand on. Move the stored boxes off the garage wall. Pull the bins and the firewood off the house. Cut back the shrub that's grown across the meter box. Unlock the side gate and put the dog somewhere.
Then, when the report comes back, read the limitations section before the summary. Every report has one. It tells you which parts of your house were not actually inspected, and that list is where the next problem lives more often than not.
How to read a clear report
Three things to look for, and the order matters.
Start with the limitations and areas not inspected. If something on that list is a wet area, a subfloor section, or the roof void, that's a job to fix before the next one. Not a reason to panic, but a genuine gap in what you know.
Then look for conducive conditions. Most reports list them. Moisture, poor drainage, timber-to-soil contact, mulch or soil above the weep holes, a leaking overflow against an external wall. These are the things that turn a house near termites into a house with termites, and almost all of them are cheap to fix compared to what they lead to. I've written about how homeowners undo their own protection in the post on breaking a new home's termite barrier, and the same list applies to a forty-year-old brick veneer.
Last, look at the recommendation about timing. For most Illawarra homes annual is right. If you back onto the escarpment, sit near a creek line, or there's known activity in your street, six to twelve months is the sensible end of it. Homes on bush blocks are their own conversation, which I've gone into in the escarpment and bush block post.
Worth knowing too: an annual inspection is a condition of a lot of termite warranties and protection agreements. If you've got one, skipping a year can affect it, so check your own paperwork rather than assuming.
What happened at Balgownie
We cleared enough of the subfloor to get around the eastern side, which took him a weekend and a trailer.
There was a mud gallery running up the inside face of a pier and across into the bearer, and the laundry wall plate above it had gone. The source was what it usually is: the washing machine outlet had been weeping into the ground next to the pier for years, and a persistently damp patch of soil against timber is an invitation.
None of that was exotic. It was visible in about ninety seconds once someone could physically stand in that part of the subfloor. Three years of reports had been quietly telling him that nobody could.
The repair was not cheap. The inspections that "missed" it had cost him a fraction of it, and the one thing that would have prevented the whole sequence was clearing a subfloor and reading a paragraph.
The uncomfortable summary
A termite inspection is not a guarantee and anyone selling it as one is overselling it. What it is, done annually and with the house actually accessible, is the cheapest way to find a problem while it's still a plumber-and-a-chippy problem rather than a structural one. NSW Government's guidance on termite risk management puts it as a combination, a management system plus regular inspections, and the combination is the point. Neither half works alone.
If you want to know what one costs around here, I've written that up separately in what a termite inspection actually costs. And if you've got a folder of clear reports you've never read past the first page of, go and read the limitations sections tonight. That's free, it takes ten minutes, and it's the single highest-value thing in this post.
If something's already worrying you, a hollow-sounding architrave or a blistered skirting or wings on a windowsill in November, give us a ring rather than poking at it. Disturbing a working gallery makes them move, and then the next inspection is looking for a colony that's relocated.
Need a hand with this in your home? Get a free quote or call 0430 007 651.