What is building consent?

Here in New Zealand, it’s where the local council gives written approval under the Building Act that allows a person to carry out building work. A council will issue a building consent only when it is satisfied the proposed building work will meet the requirements of the Building Code.

The first stage of the consent process is a concept design recently there have been large delays to book in with designers and from our experience, this stage can take between 2 – 3 months.

Once you have a signed off a concept you are happy with it’s time to start the consent drawings.  This involves sending the concept to an engineer who will conduct a soil test and foundation design. You also need to send it concept off to truss design and if your site is on a rural section you’ll need a septic design. On some sites, we also need wind reports. these consultants then send all this information back to the designer to be turned into your consent drawings. from our experience, this process takes around 3 – 5 months.

The consent drawings are then sent to the council for processing this takes a minimum of 20 working days, however with the current demand for new builds the councils are overworked and our experience with this stage is that it takes between 2 and 3 months.

There are things we can do to work with you to push your building consent along. The best thing to do now is planning and thinking ahead. Locking stuff in now is great because every little change tweaks the process as well.