Australian public registers record what is happening long before it is reported. Company
formations, court judgments, planning consents, licensing actions and insurance certificates
each carry a date. Read in sequence, they describe events months or years ahead of the market.
This is where we write that up.
The headline on a builder collapse is always the debt pile and the stranded buyers.
Subcontractors sit below both of them — behind $3.1 billion of secured lending in
Bathla’s case, in the same class as a $145 million tax claim. And the exposure
does not end when the builder stops paying: under s 588FA a liquidator can come back
six months later for money already banked.
The statutory queue, the unfair preference trap, why the good faith defence punishes the
subbies who chased hardest, and what actually reduces the risk.
If you own a liquor brand in Australia, you probably don’t sell it — you set
the direction and buy the media, and someone else does the selling. Your off-premise view
is supplied by retailers; your on-premise view stops at the wholesaler. Australia’s
52,004 licensed premises, the companies behind them and the 4,595 venues currently
applying to open are all public record, and nobody has assembled them.
Eight things to verify before you sign an off-the-plan contract in NSW, and exactly where
each one is publicly searchable. Who you are actually buying from, whether your deposit is
held in trust, how many storeys decide your warranty cover, which builder owes it, and
what the consent conditions say has to happen before anyone can start.
Universal Property Group entered voluntary administration owing more than $3.5 billion,
having said it had almost 26,000 homes in development. Four months earlier its accounts
carried a clean audit opinion. A 2023 Supreme Court judgment, company formations ceasing in 2024,
statutory accounts going overdue, a lender withdrawing $670 million — every signal was
public, dated, and sitting on a different register.
Includes what off-the-plan buyers should check now, and why most apartment purchasers have
no home warranty cover at all.
