Registration and contracts. Building and Energy, part of the Department of Local Government, Industry Regulation and Safety, registers builders, painters, building surveyors and building engineers, and licenses plumbers, electrical workers and gasfitters. Tiling and waterproofing aren't on its list. Builder registration only comes into it for “builder work”: work that needs a building permit, is worth $20,000 or more ($50,000 for a Class 10a building such as a shed) and is in the prescribed area, which takes in 122 local governments. A subcontractor working for the registered builder named on the permit doesn't need registering, and whether a given bathroom job needs a permit is a question for the local government. Our page for Perth builders covers the number a registered contractor has to put in its advertising. Contract law reaches further. The Home Building Contracts Act covers fixed-price contracts for home building work between $7,500 and $500,000, whether or not the builder is registered, and Building and Energy's homeowner guidance names tiling among the associated work it includes. The contract has to be written, dated and signed by both sides, the owner must be given the prescribed Notice for the Home Owner before signing, and the deposit is capped at 6.5 per cent. Those rules are under review: a discussion paper put higher deposit limits and revised thresholds out for comment from 13 May to 24 June 2026, with final recommendations due to government in September 2026.
What inspectors found on Perth sites. Building and Energy made shower waterproofing one of its 2022–23 audit priorities because of a high volume of complaints about leaks, and carried the work into 2023–24. Its General Inspection Report Ten covers 86 shower areas in 38 buildings under construction around the Perth metropolitan area, the work of 24 building contractors, with most of the inspections in apartment buildings. Of 1,360 inspection points, 60 per cent were satisfactory, and one in five of the failures came down to waterstops that were substandard or missing. The membranes themselves did better on the basics: two coats were correctly applied in 97 per cent of areas checked and the right primer used in 93 per cent. The tiling checks, limited to items that affect the waterproofing underneath, failed at 47 of 78 points. An earlier snapshot, General Inspection Report Six, found too little room left for sealant at the shower's wall and floor junctions in all nine tiled wet areas inspected, and membrane carried under the lip of the bath in just one of seven. Industry Bulletin 177 followed in August 2026 with the hob and waterstop guidance above. None of that tells an owner whether your own work is sound, but it explains why a careful one asks, and why stage photos and a written account of your method earn a place on the site.
Apartment leaks and strata approvals. For Report Six, Building and Energy also surveyed 23 strata managers in 2019. They ranked apartment buildings of four storeys or more as the most likely to have wet-area waterproofing problems, said those problems usually appeared when a building was one to three years old, and ranked the apartment below as the place a leak most often shows first. About six in ten said the problems sometimes came back after repairs. Owners renovating an apartment bathroom have strata steps of their own. Landgate's fact sheet on renovations in strata titles schemes says approvals are typically required from the strata company, and that the default conduct by-laws stop an owner altering the structure of their lot without giving the strata company 14 days' written notice. The same fact sheet says renovating in a survey-strata scheme is less complicated: subject to the by-laws, approval for a structural alteration is only needed if the finished work would breach the lot's plot ratio or open space requirement. A tiler's site can list what you supply for a strata application, such as insurance details, working hours and the membrane system you use, and leave by-law questions to the strata manager.
Where the houses, villas and apartments are. At the 2021 Census, Greater Perth had 778,620 occupied private dwellings. Separate houses made up 605,453 of them, about 78 per cent. Another 110,325, or 14 per cent, were semi-detached, row or terrace houses and townhouses, and 79,348 of those were a single storey. Flats and apartments numbered 59,492, under 8 per cent, against roughly 31 per cent in Greater Sydney. The apartments sit close to the centre: 90 per cent of occupied homes in the City of Perth, 36 per cent in Subiaco and 30 per cent in Vincent, against 0.7 per cent in Armadale and 0.4 per cent in both Wanneroo and Serpentine-Jarrahdale. The City of Stirling, Perth's biggest council by occupied homes with 90,318, had 22,070 single-storey semi-detached homes and townhouses, close to one in four. A tiler working mostly around Wanneroo, where about 92 per cent of occupied homes are separate houses, will spend nearly every day in them; one based in Stirling will see plenty of smaller grouped homes; one in the inner city will be dealing with strata most weeks. The suburbs you list and the photos you lead with should make your own mix obvious.
Bore water, old wall sheeting and how we work. The Department of Water and Environmental Regulation's Be Groundwater Wise site says iron staining from garden bores is common in Perth, forming when dissolved iron in the water meets the air, and that correctly installed sprinklers that avoid overspray and run-off can prevent it; its Perth Groundwater Map shows the iron staining risk for an address. An outdoor tiling page can send owners there. Indoors, the City of Cockburn lists asbestos cement sheeting in bathroom, toilet and laundry walls, ceilings and floors, and vinyl floor tiles in kitchens, among the places asbestos may be found. Residents may remove up to 10 square metres themselves, while removing more than that of non-friable asbestos, or any friable asbestos, needs a licence. If you strip out old bathrooms, say who handles that stage. We present what you tell us and link to the official pages; legal, safety and building advice stays with you and the regulators. We're an Adelaide team on Hutt St and work with Perth tilers by phone and email. Adelaide runs an hour and a half ahead of Perth, or two and a half during South Australian daylight saving. Our clients so far are in SA, NSW, VIC and QLD, and we haven't built a tiler's site or a WA site yet, so your pages are built from the photos, suburbs and notes on your method that you send us.
