Licences. Building Commission NSW handles building and trade licences in NSW. Alongside general building, NSW has a contractor licence category for kitchen, bathroom and laundry renovation: it covers installing, refurbishing, restoring and repairing those rooms, but not work on any load-bearing part of the building such as floors, walls, columns or beams, and specialist work within the job has to be subcontracted to someone who holds that specialist licence. Plumbing and electrical work need a licence whatever the job is worth, while waterproofing and wall and floor tiling are trade licences required for residential work over $5,000. Written contracts, the 10 percent deposit cap, Home Building Compensation cover and the rules on what a trade ad must show apply to renovators as they do to builders; our page for Sydney builders sets those out.
Strata. At the 2021 Census, about 31 percent of Greater Sydney's occupied homes were flats or apartments, and the spread across the city is uneven: more than three-quarters in the City of Sydney and North Sydney council areas, under 10 percent in Blacktown, Camden and The Hills. NSW strata guidance lists bathroom renovations, and any work that needs waterproofing, as major renovations. Only the owners corporation can approve them, by special resolution at an annual or other general meeting. The motion passes unless more than a quarter of the value of votes cast is against it, and it must say whether the owners corporation or the lot owner will look after the common property involved from then on. If the work changes the structure, the owner gives 14 days' written notice before it begins. The NSW guidance sets no approval period for major renovations, so the timing depends on when the owners corporation next holds a general meeting. A renovator who explains that sequence and plans start dates around it reads as someone who has done strata jobs before.
Plumbing paperwork and warranties. Plumbing inspections in Sydney run through Building Commission NSW. Its guidance exempts bathroom renovations where the fixtures stay in the same place from the Notice of Work; once fixtures move, that exemption no longer applies and the plumber lodges one through MyInspections before starting. All plumbing work finishes with a Certificate of Compliance, and a copy goes to whoever arranged the job, whether the owner or the renovator. Our Sydney plumbers page covers that system in more detail. After handover, NSW statutory warranties on contracts signed since 1 February 2012 run six years for major defects and two years for everything else.
Older homes and rentals. SafeWork NSW says bonded asbestos cement sheeting was common in building materials from the 1940s to the late 1980s, and its photo examples include a Tilux bathroom wall, sheeting behind tiles and vinyl floor tiles with their adhesive. Removing more than 10 square metres of non-friable asbestos needs a non-friable removal licence, and any amount of friable asbestos needs a friable licence. Rentals are the other large Sydney market: about 657,000 of Greater Sydney's 1.83 million occupied homes were rented at the 2021 Census, including roughly six in ten of its apartments. NSW landlords who pass water usage charges on to tenants need showerheads and indoor kitchen and basin taps with a maximum flow of 9 litres a minute and, since 23 March 2025, dual-flush toilets with at least a three-star WELS rating.
People search by suburb and region: the Eastern Suburbs, the Inner West, the North Shore, the Northern Beaches, the Hills, the Shire, Western Sydney and Macarthur. List the ones you'll quote in, and if unit work keeps you close to the city while house jobs take you west, the site can show that split. WebCraft Studio is an Adelaide team at Ste 3/110 Hutt St, so Sydney renovators work with us by phone and email: you send photos, licence details and your suburb list, we send a draft link, and you pay once you've approved it.