The average AU property inspection report runs 47 pages of dense, technical prose: AS/NZS clause references, trade jargon, defect classifications, and hedged recommendations. Buyers get 72 hours to make a purchase decision on top of it. This page documents the five passes we run and where they stop.
01Extract
The first pass is boring and important: pull the text out of the PDF correctly. Digital reports are straightforward; scanned reports from older NSW council archives need OCR with a custom lexicon so efflorescence, hygrometric, and delamination survive intact.
Every extracted token carries its page number and clause reference - not as metadata we might surface, but as a hard link back into the source. No finding leaves the pipeline without a citation.
02Classify
Findings are tagged Critical, Major, Moderate, or Minor. The thresholds are deterministic, not model-judged: structural elements load-bearing the building are Critical by definition; cosmetic items under $1,000 AUD are Minor by definition. Everything in between has a decision tree trained on 12,000 inspector-labelled findings.
A confident "maybe" is worse than a hedged "no". If we can't classify with evidence, we don't ship the finding - we flag it for the reviewer. ReportWise AI · engineering principles · 2025
03Cost
Every item gets an AUD range, not a point estimate. Ranges reflect current (quarterly-rolling) trade rates for the postcode, based on our cost-range-registry of ~380 common remediation line-items. A structural crack greater than 0.3mm in a load-bearing wall in Sydney's inner-west is not the same dollar figure as the same defect in Hobart - so we don't pretend it is.
04Translate
This is where most inspection-report tools fall apart. We keep the technical term visible ("rising damp - hygrometric > 85% at skirt") and add a plain-English sentence directly after ("ground moisture is rising into the north wall; untreated, this damages masonry"). Readers can check the translation against the original term. No information is lost; jargon is just annotated.
05Validate
Final pass: a licensed reviewer checks every Critical and Major finding against the source PDF. Minor and Moderate findings are sampled - roughly 1 in 4 - and the reviewer rejects or edits before the report is shipped to you. This pass is not optional and not AI-only. It's the reason Premium tier takes 30 minutes, not 4 hours.
06Limits
We won't: make a purchase recommendation, value the property, assess finance, predict future repair costs beyond 12 months, replace a licensed building inspector for contractual purposes, or guarantee completeness on a scanned report where OCR confidence drops below 92%. If you see "REVIEWER FLAGGED" on any finding, that's us telling you the automated pass wasn't confident enough - a human wrote that line, and you should read it carefully.