Who we are

Auckland Construction Consultants

We aim to improve the quality of New Zealand building construction by helping Architects, designers and builders mitigate their risk through design review and construction observation, and helping building owners navigate through their building related needs.

We believe in ‘Right first time, on time, on budget’.

Who are our clients

Reveal BC are able to help many different sectors through our services. From homeowners, banks and lenders, commercial business properties, leaky building owners, Architects and Designers, insurance companies and more.

Residential and Apartment building consultants

Reveal provide services for residential building owners, through building surveys including weathertightness, maintenance, disabled access, building condition, and measured surveys, as well as providing reclad designs and construction observation through our clerk of works services. We are experienced in providing turnkey solutions to building defects, encompassing investigation, remedial design and clerk of works to providing expert evidence in litigation to recover costs for the repairs. We have experience of residential standalone buildings and low and high rise multi-unit apartment buildings.

Commercial building consultants

Reveal BC provide Commercial Property Consultancy for businesses such as commercial property owners, property managers, insurers, body corporates, councils, government departments/ministries, infrastructure developers and contractors for their commercial buildings. Our team has a wealth of experience in commercial property construction to help with your survey or remedial work.

Areas we serve

Based on the North Shore of Auckland, Reveal provide building surveying, recladding services and sustainable building consultancy Auckland wide. Our point of difference is that we do not charge vehicle related expenses in the greater Auckland area. Reveal also have clients in Northland and the Bay of Plenty, particularly Tauranga and Mount Maunganui.

How we help our clients

How do you help leaky building owners?

Leaky home owners require certainty of the nature, extent and cost of repairing their homes and what options are available to them. By providing comprehensive invasive and non-invasive weathertight investigations we can determine accurately the extent and nature of the defects and damage and obtain accurate costings for remedying the defects.

We can also offer advice regarding the possible responsibility of other parties in the event of a formal claim being pursued. We can help leaky homeowners fix their buildings, providing remedial design, overseeing the construction work and assessing the timber frame for decay damage during the work.

How do you help commercial property owners?

Commercial property owners’ needs can be wide and varied, ranging from maintenance planning,  isolated defect diagnosis, and repair recommendations through to large scale building investigation and expert witness representation and design and monitoring of major alterations and repairs.

Whatever the need, we are happy to discuss and provide proposals wherever we can offer assistance. If you wish to maintain, develop, alter or refurbish your building, we can provide an accurate scope of work, design, building consent (if required) and construction management to achieve building code compliance, completed on time, on budget and to the required quality.

How do you help architects and designers?

Architects and designers are often called into weathertight defect claims for leaky buildings due to inadequate or incorrect information in their plans and specifications. By conducting thorough reviews of plans and specifications prior to submission for building consent, or prior to starting work on site, we can identify potential building code non-compliances and offer alternative design solutions, particularly to high-risk areas of weather-tightness, thus reducing the designer’s potential liabilities for being sued.

If architects or designers are called in as respondents in a construction defects claim we can provide expert witness services by investigating the circumstances of the claim and preparing evidence and opinion as to their responsibility for the defects.

For alterations and additions, we can assist by providing measured surveys and as-built plans and elevations in .DWG or .IFC format for them to develop their designs as proposed.

Architects and designers are also often called into leaky building claims due to the construction work not being implemented in accordance with the design plans and specification. For confidence that construction work is carried out in accordance with the plans and specifications, we can carry out Clerk of Works or construction observation duties throughout the construction period and/or provide contract administration services under a formal construction contract as an engineer to the contract.

How do you help insurers?

Insurers are often requested to pay building owners or contractors for damage under their insurance policies. The damage may be the subject of specific exclusions within their insured policies, for example, there is often an exclusion in building insurance policies relating to weather-tightness of a leaky building.

Through building investigation, we can provide a clear understanding of the nature, extent, timescale, and cause of any damage and therefore provide the insurers with clear independent evidence on which to base their decision: to pay out under their policy or not.

I’m a residential home owner – how can you help me?

We can help with identifying the cause and remedy of building damage, by assessing buildings for weathertightness, by resolving unconsented building work, outstanding CCCs, section 95a and NTF issues, designing remedial or maintenance work and by producing as-built plans and elevations prior to starting building alterations or additions.

If you suspect your home might be a leaky building, we can find out for you. We can also identify potentially responsible parties to seek compensation from if the building was recently purchased or if the work is less than 10 years old.

We can provide a vendor’s report prior to the sale of your property, to determine what items require maintenance and repair that would ordinarily be discovered by a prospective purchaser’s inspection.

If you wish to develop or alter your home, we can provide an accurate scope of work, design documentation, building consent (if required) and construction management to achieve the desired result to building code compliance, on time, on budget and to the required quality.

How can you help banks and other lenders?

Banks and other lenders often require a building survey (also known as a builder’s report or a builder’s inspection) to be carried out prior to agreeing to lend money to purchase or alter a property.

By carrying out a thorough building survey and providing a report we can provide the appropriate level of information on which a lending institution can base its decision on whether to lend or not. This provides useful information about the nature and condition of the building, significant defects, significant repairing and maintenance issues and the likelihood of it being a leaky building and can therefore allocate risk accordingly.

If a bank or other lender is approached by one of their clients for a loan to carry out construction, either of a completely new building or alterations to an existing building, they may wish to obtain confirmation that the construction work will be completed to an acceptable standard and in compliance with the building consent, the building code and the manufacturer’s recommended instructions.

In order to safeguard the lender in this respect the lender may wish to impose loan criterion on their client to engage an independent Clerk of Works to monitor key stages of construction to ensure all work is carried out correctly to ensure building code compliance and an appropriate quality of finished building work is achieved.

This will help to safeguard the lender’s investment in the event their client defaults on the loan, for whatever reason, and will provide confidence that the construction completed up to the stage of default has been completed correctly and can be continued by others from the date of default through to completion.

Why choose us

Hands on Experience

Reveal building consultants are Chartered and Registered Building Surveyors, Certified Weathertightness Surveyors, Licensed Designers, Certified Passive House Consultants, Registered Air Tightness Testers and Registered Clerk of Works. Our point of difference is our mixture of hands on construction, building surveying and engineering experience. We have over 70 years combined construction expertise in the UK and New Zealand.

Professional Indemnity Insurance

We have Professional Indemnity Insurance ($2m cover) and General Liability Insurance ($10m cover) for all the work we carry out which is underwritten by Lloyds of London.

Aim for perfection

We believe it is far better to aim for perfection at the design and construction stage, rather than aim for ‘Minimum necessary to achieve council sign-off’ and hope for the best. Otto von Bismarck once said ‘…Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others’.

Evidence based solutions

We have extensive experience of other people’s mistakes from our hundreds of defective building investigations. The evidence of the last fifteen to twenty years of the NZ construction industry’s mistakes leads us to one fundamental conclusion: It is better to try and get it right first time rather than re-visit the mistakes later at considerable cost to building owners, tenants, designers, contractors, sub-contractors, councils, government, insurers and lenders.

Extensive industry experience

Reveal Building Consultants Limited’s surveyors have considerable knowledge and experience of the NZ building industry’s mistakes. We are therefore well placed to assist building owners, occupiers, lenders, insurers and councils in all aspects of their property-related needs, whether it be related to a potential acquisition, maintenance, alteration, repair, building code compliance or expert witness representation.

However, if we had the choice, we would much prefer to help people to construct buildings with zero defects to begin with – right first time!

Meet the team

Work with the professionals

Nick Gaites

Nick, a graduate Manufacturing Systems Engineer, is a New Zealand Registered Building Surveyor and has over 10 years’ experience in the New Zealand Construction sector. Prior to this he was director of an Auckland residential building company which latterly specialised in leaky building remediation. Nick also has UK building experience and multi-discipline expertise with a mixture of engineering, construction, and building surveying experience.

Angus Pengelly

Angus is a qualified builder and construction manager, with over 13 years of experience in the NZ construction industry. More recently Angus has three years of experience as a building consent processing officer. The combination of hands-on experience across multiple disciplines has given Angus a unique and broad knowledge base of the NZ Building Code and construction techniques and technology in New Zealand.

Diego Ariel Zirlinger

Diego is an Argentinian Architect, graduated from University of Buenos Aires. During his studies he designed houses, schools, public museums and sports centres. He worked as an Architect assistant for a local studio for four years.

There, he developed several projects, from bars and hotels to residential buildings, where gained most of his experience.

Julieta Lucila Meyer

Julieta is an Argentinian Architect, graduated from the University of Buenos Aires in 2017. Julieta is very responsible and committed, loves to learn, and get fully involved in the projects that she participates in. Above all, she always tries to find a sustainable solution to the project, because it is in her belief that it is very important to include sustainability in construction.

Claudia Morales Mirabal

Claudia is a Chilean Architect who graduated from the University of Buenos Aires in 2018. She is methodical and disciplined in her work and eagerly accepts new challenges.

Tristan Henson

Tristan graduated from Sheffield Hallam University in the UK with honours in Building Surveying.  Since moving to New Zealand in 2016 he has gained over 8 years’ experience working within the Building Control environment in both residential and commercial capacities across multiple Councils in both the North and South Islands.  Prior to this, he worked in Australia within the private sector as a building certifier gaining exposure to a wide variety of construction and legislative practices.

Talk to our professionals today and get your project SORTED