For the first ten minutes I don’t go inside.
Agents find this odd, especially on a Saturday when there’s a queue behind me. What I’m doing on the footpath is reading the block. Sydney is hilly, and on the same street a house near the top and a house near the bottom are two different propositions. At the bottom, everybody’s stormwater arrives in your yard when it really rains, and you can read it off the neighbours’ retaining walls and drains. Near the top, exposed on all sides, the winter southerly comes through hard enough to move the outdoor furniture.
Then the roads. A T-intersection aiming straight at the front door is the case the old texts talk about most, and in daily life it means headlights sweeping across your living room half the night. I look at what’s standing directly in front of the entrance: a power pole, a substation box, one of those green plastic pillars the utilities plant on the verge. Then the neighbours’ buildings, a gable end or a roof corner pointed at a particular window, and whether the site across the road has a DA in for a three-storey block, which anyone can check on the council’s tracker. Transmission towers, service stations, substations further out. How far away is far enough, I can’t give you a number and practitioners disagree; further is better.
Water, in the classical sense, isn’t just rivers and ocean. Mostly it’s where rain arrives from and where it leaves, plus whether a sewer line runs under the block. That one you don’t have to guess about: the sewerage service diagram is in the contract. Stormwater usually isn’t, and you’d be chasing the council drainage plan for it.
The compass part is duller than it looks
The reading fixes what we call sitting and facing, the axis everything in the compass method hangs off.
A luopan reads magnetic direction, and I read it as it comes, without converting to true north. Practitioners split on this one; a san he plate carries three separate needle rings for exactly this argument. I’m telling you which ring I use.
If you take your own reading with the compass app on your phone, most apps give you true north by default, and around Sydney magnetic declination is a bit over twelve degrees east. The twenty-four mountains divide the horizon into fifteen-degree sectors, so twelve degrees is close to a whole sector gone. When a client’s number and mine don’t match, that’s nearly always why.
The other half of the job is standing somewhere the needle isn’t lying: away from the car, the switchboard, reinforcing steel, pipes under the floor. I take readings at three or four positions and want them to agree before writing anything down.
Practitioners genuinely differ on which elevation counts as the facing. A terrace or a semi has its front door on the narrow end, but the surface the household lives against all day is the glass at the back looking into the yard. I take the main aspect for light and air, not automatically the side with the street number on it. Others don’t.
Inside, room by room
What you see standing in the doorway. Plenty of Australian houses have no entry space at all, so you push the door and you’re in the living room. In newer open-plan layouts you more often get a clear line of sight from the front door straight through the back glass to the yard.
Then circulation, which I weight more heavily than the front door. People here drive home and come in through the garage, and in most houses that internal door opens into the kitchen or the laundry. That’s the door groceries come through, and kids, and tools, five or six times a day. The formal front door gets opened when a courier rings the bell. The classics talk about the main door as the mouth that takes in qi; in Australia the main door frequently isn’t the one anybody uses.
The stove: which way it sits, whether it faces the sink across a walkway, what’s on the other side of the wall behind it, whether it’s been put under a window. Beds: mainly what’s behind the headboard. A bathroom, a stairwell, a garage. In two-storey project homes I see the upstairs master headboard backing onto the stair void constantly.
Bathrooms get judged on position. The hardest case is a bathroom in the centre of the plan, or an upstairs one sitting directly above the entry or above the stove. Modern two-storey houses do this over and over, because the plumbing gets stacked to save money.
Light is the part that has to be relearned below the equator. Sydney sits at thirty-four degrees south, so at midday on the winter solstice the sun is only about thirty-two degrees up, coming in low from the north; at midsummer it’s near eighty and almost overhead. North-facing living space gets winter sun and can be shaded in summer by an eave of the right depth. A south-facing room gets no midday sun in any month. From roughly October to March it picks up an hour or so of very low sun early and late, because the sun rises and sets south of due east and west.
The three kinds of house I see most
Federation terraces, the Inner West stock. Long and narrow, with a middle bedroom that often has no window at all. The kitchen and bathroom are usually a later addition tacked onto the back, so the bathroom is reached through the kitchen or off the rear verandah, and a corridor runs the full length from the front door. Whether that addition was built properly is a question for a building inspector, not for me.
Seventies and eighties brick veneer. The garage eats the frontage, the kitchen is on the shaded side, the ceilings are low. Nothing hidden about any of it.
House and land packages in the new estates. Narrow lots, the house built to the edges, side setbacks of about a metre with one side that never sees sun. The whole street is the same few designs on the same orientation because the lots came off a production line. The ensuite is often one wall away from the headboard. The powder room goes under the stairs. And the alfresco faces wherever the lot faces, so half the street ends up with its main outdoor space pointing south.
That last one leaves me with a problem. A street of them, identical plans, identical facing, and the charts come out nearly indistinguishable. The households are not having anything like the same time of it. The usual answer is that you have to go down to the individual birth charts, and I know the argument, but I can’t turn it into a prediction I could test in advance. I don’t have an answer for this one.
What you get
The site visit runs an hour or two. The report gets written afterwards.
The changes get ordered by when you’d do them. Anything that means opening a wall or moving a pipe goes first, because the trades are in the house once and doing it again later is a separate bill; bed positions, furniture and shading go last, since you can redo those on any weekend. Each item says who you need for it, a carpenter, a tiler, a licensed plumber or electrician, and those last two you’re not allowed to do yourself here.
What can’t be changed is mostly load-bearing walls, plumbing positions and the orientation of the block. A structural wall can come out, but it wants an engineer’s drawing and a steel beam and usually approval, and most people stop once they’ve priced it. Waste pipes have to fall a certain way, so moving a bathroom means opening the floor. The block faces where it faces. Those get worked around rather than fixed.
The reports used to run twenty or thirty pages, read once and put in a drawer. Now the three or four things you could do this month go on page one and the rest follows behind.
I don’t promise outcomes. I don’t look at structure, termites, title or contract terms; for those you want a building inspector and your solicitor or conveyancer. Anything touching health or investment, go to the person licensed for it.
Auctions exchange on the fall of the hammer, no cooling-off, and the rules vary by state so ask your solicitor. After that all I can do is find the movable parts inside a house you already own.