You can verify a Broome builder in an afternoon. Confirm their registration with Building and Energy, confirm Home Indemnity Insurance before you pay a deposit, ask how long they have traded in this market specifically, ask what they own rather than what they can arrange, and get the warranty terms in writing. Here is each one in order.
One. Confirm the registration yourself
In Western Australia, builders must be registered. Ask for the registration number and verify it through the Building and Energy division of the Department of Energy, Mines, Industry Regulation and Safety rather than taking it on trust. A builder who hesitates at that question has answered it.
Two. Confirm Home Indemnity Insurance before any money moves
It is illegal in Western Australia for a builder to take a deposit before Home Indemnity Insurance is in place. Ask for evidence of the policy. This cover is what protects you if the builder cannot complete the work, which is precisely the scenario you cannot assess from the outside.
Three. Ask how long they have traded in this market
Not how long in construction. How long in Broome. Building in the Kimberley is not building in Perth, and experience elsewhere does not transfer cleanly to a market where materials travel more than 2,200 kilometres and cyclone season closes the road between November and April.
A builder who has been here through several wet seasons and several market cycles has been tested in a way a newer operation has not.
Four. Ask what they own, not what they can arrange
This is the question most people never think to ask, and in a remote market it is the most revealing one. Own machinery, own cabinet shop, trades on staff. What a builder controls directly determines whether your build keeps moving when something goes wrong.
A builder relying on three to five subcontractors who also work for everyone else in town cannot recover lost time. When your job slips, you join the back of somebody else’s queue.
Five. Ask who you will speak to, and how often
The complaint we hear most often about other builders is short. We never knew what was happening. Get the name of your project supervisor, the arrangement for site meetings, and how you see progress, before you sign rather than after.
Six. Get the defects period and warranty in writing
Ask what the defects liability period is, what it covers, and who you call in year four when something needs attention. Then ask whether that person will still be there. Following handover of your new home, H&M Tracey provides a 4-month defects liability period, together with a 6-year structural guarantee, subject to the terms and conditions of your building contract.
Seven. Look at completed work, then ask about the hard jobs
Ask to see finished work of the same type and scale as yours. Then ask about a job that went wrong. Every builder with a long history has had one, and how they describe it tells you considerably more than the portfolio does.
What our answers are
For the sake of being useful rather than coy. Harold Tracey finished his carpentry apprenticeship here in the Kimberley, worked for the big builders in Perth, and came home to Broome in 2000. Since then, more than 500 homes and commercial buildings, over thirty staff including apprentices we have trained ourselves, and three directors who came up through the business, which means there is a genuine succession plan rather than one person holding it together.
The commercial work is the part that answers the infrastructure question. Broome International Airport, the Royal Flying Doctors hangar, Broome TAFE, Notre Dame, St Marys Secondary School, the Lions Eye Institute, the Kimberley District Police Station, the KAMS Regional Offices, Broome Sea Rescue Headquarters, and a $6.6 million fifteen unit development for Nyamba Buru Yawuru delivered ahead of schedule.
We have been members of Master Builders since 2000 and the Association of Professional Builders since 2023. Registered Builder No. BL#11915.
Ask us any of the seven questions above on the phone. 0483 961 437.
For the full picture on costs, timelines, contracts and how to check a builder, read Building or Renovating in Broome, The Complete Guide.
