Before signing a residential building contract in Victoria, three free checks on the Building and Plumbing Commission website take about five minutes: confirm the builder is registered, confirm the registration class actually covers building a whole house, and check the separate disciplinary register. Most homeowners do the first and stop there.
How Do I Check If a Builder Is Registered in Victoria?
Search the Building and Plumbing Commission practitioner register at bams.vba.vic.gov.au/bams/s/practitioner-search. Search the company name and the individual builder’s name separately, because they hold separate registration numbers, and confirm the Status field reads Current.
This is the step most people already know about. It is also the step where the checking usually stops, which is why the two below matter more than they look.
What Is the Difference Between Domestic Builder Unlimited and Limited?
On the same search result, further down, sits the registration class. The Commission defines the two categories quite differently.
- Domestic Builder (Unlimited) — responsible for carrying out, managing and arranging all components of domestic building work. This is what most people mean when they say builder.
- Domestic Builder (Limited) — permitted to carry out only certain types of domestic building work. Victoria has twenty-seven separate limited categories, including carpentry, tiling, painting and swimming pool construction.
Holding a registration and being permitted to build an entire house are two different things. A search result showing Current confirms the first. It says nothing about the second until you read the line underneath it.
Is a Builder’s Disciplinary History Public?
Yes, and it sits on a different page: bpc.vic.gov.au/compliance-and-enforcement-register. A clean practitioner search tells you nothing about this one.
Worth knowing the scope before reading too much into an empty result. Individual records go back to April 2019 and company records to July 2018, and each entry remains listed for five years.
What Happens to Insurance If the Builder Was Never Registered?
Victorian domestic building insurance covers registered builders. An owner who has contracted with an unregistered person sits outside the scheme entirely — not a reduced entitlement, but no eligibility at all.
In October 2025, ABC News reported that clients of Melbourne builder MJ Harris Group had lost their savings when the company went into liquidation. One owner had paid $140,000 outside his contract for materials; investigators found $900 worth had been purchased. Another paid $25,000 against a $32,000 design contract and was left with concept drawings and a 3D file — in her words, nothing she could take to another builder. After the collapse, the Building and Plumbing Commission confirmed the company’s principal had never been registered as a builder and is under investigation for unregistered building work. His trade was painting.
That case is unusual in its details but not isolated in its shape. The Victorian government runs a support payment scheme for owners whose builder collapsed and who could not claim insurance; the list of eligible liquidated builders currently has twenty-four companies on it.
What Insurance Is Required for a Residential Build in Victoria?
For contracts signed on or after 1 July 2026, domestic building work over $20,000 requires Home Warranty insurance, capped at $400,000. A claim is available where work is incomplete, defective or non-compliant and the builder will not or cannot rectify it.
For contracts signed before that date, work over $16,000 required Domestic Building Insurance, capped at $300,000, and claims were only available where the builder had died, disappeared or become insolvent.
Ask for the Certificate of Insurance before signing rather than after.
Our Own Registration Details
It would be inconsistent to write this and not publish our own. Both are searchable on the register described above.
- Crave Build Pty Ltd — Domestic Builder (Unlimited), registration CDB-U 102006, status Current.
- Yue Teng (Abby) — Domestic Builder (Unlimited), registration DB-U 102065, status Current.
Searched against the compliance and enforcement register, Crave Build Pty Ltd returns no result.
What Should I Ask a Builder Once I Have the Quote?
Confirming registration establishes that a builder is permitted to do the work. The commercial terms are a separate conversation, and seven questions cover most of what tends to go wrong.
1. Which Items Are Provisional Sums or Prime Cost Items, and What Is Allowed for Each?
These two columns are where cost is deferred until after work starts. A quote that reads as competitive is often competitive precisely here.
2. What Is Excluded?
Landscaping, pool, furniture, window furnishings, audiovisual, fencing, driveway and final clean are the common ones. A builder whose exclusions run to two pages has usually done the work of thinking it through.
3. Which Drawing Revision Is This Quote Based On?
Ask for the drawing number and date. Where three quotes come back far further apart than expected, the usual explanation is that the three builders were not pricing the same documents.
4. Are Materials Specified by Brand and Model?
Two products both described as marble can differ several times over in price. Anything agreed verbally and left off the documents does not exist.
5. What Triggers a Variation, and How Is It Priced?
Who notifies whom, in writing, and on what basis the price is calculated. Variations determine the final spend rather more than the contract sum does.
6. Who Is the Site Manager, and How Many Sites Are They Running?
That is the person on site every day, which is not necessarily the person who signed the contract.
7. Does the Contract State Calendar Days or Working Days?
How that field is completed determines who gets to characterise a delay as a delay.
Final Thoughts
Three checks and seven questions take under ten minutes in total. For most homeowners that is a better use of the time than obtaining a third quote.
We are candid about fit. Where the priority is the lowest available price, or the project is townhouses or multi-lot development, we are not the right builder. Where the project is a single home to live in, in Melbourne, and a quote is already in hand, we are happy to read through it with you at no cost and with no expectation of the work.
Abby (Yue Teng), Registered Domestic Builder — Unlimited. Phone 0426 811 987, or WeChat a295972902.