Your Property- File Builder
In addition to preparing drawings; architects’ responsibilities encompass questions of ownership, land law and compliance with the wide range of legislation relating to land and buildings. Like other professionals with responsibility for different forms of compliance, the biggest part of many architectural service tasks is “building the file” of relevant facts and information about a property. This takes a lot of work and time, and comprises a large part of the cost of many architectural services. However a lot of the required data is freely available using online sources, and much of this work can be done by anyone with general IT skills.
Visiting the right websites and collating all available information is a crucial step. For our design clients we build up our file over the many weeks of a design process. However extensive consultation with official records can also be necessary to answer seemingly straightforward compliance questions for one- off services like: design consultations, inspections, daylight analysis consultancy, planning submissions and other reports.
This page is provided to guide clients for small standalone architectural tasks through the process of compiling relevant property records and providing them to your architect in a concise and consistent way. By compiling information in this way, it makes it quicker and more cost effective for us to offer high level professional opinions and advice. You also get your desired outcomes faster.
See notes on each field with directions on how to find the relevant information.