A free defect checklist app, instead of another PDF.

Why a printed checklist stops working the moment you use it

A printed checklist is a good way to prepare and a poor way to record. In an empty unit you are holding a torch, a phone, a bottle of water and, at some point, a set of keys. Adding a clipboard means putting something else down.

The bigger problem is what happens afterwards. Your photographs sit in your camera roll in the order you took them. Your ticks and scribbles sit on paper. Nothing connects photo 47 to the line that says hairline crack, bedroom 2, and by the evening you are zooming into pictures of skirting boards trying to work out which room each one was. When you then sit down to type the list into HDB's or your developer's submission form, you are reconstructing your own afternoon from memory.

The checklists themselves are usually fine, and the fundamentals in them do not date much, because tiles, taps and sockets have not changed much. The format is what dates: a PDF cannot take a photograph, cannot timestamp anything, and cannot hand you a tidy list at the end.

What every defect entry needs: location, category, description, photo

Whatever tool you use, an entry that will still make sense a week later has four parts. This is not our invention: it mirrors the fields HDB's own Defects Feedback form asks for, which we walk through in detail in our HDB defect submission walkthrough.

• Location: The room or area, named the way the form names it: Living, Master Bedroom, Common Bathroom, Kitchen, Service Yard, Bomb Shelter, Balcony. Add a position within the room, because "master bathroom" is not a location when there are forty tiles in it. "Wall beside the shower mixer, second row from the floor" is.
• Category: The system the defect belongs to. HDB's form lists Architectural, Tiling, Plumbing, Electrical, Doors and Windows, and Bomb Shelter. Grouping this way is also how the contractor who has to fix them reads the list, so sorting by category at the end saves you doing it twice.
• Description: Specific and plain. "Hairline crack on the wall above the door frame, roughly 200mm long" is a defect. "Crack" is a note to yourself.
• A dated photograph: Taken at the item, showing the item, with something for scale where scale matters: a coin, a ruler, a hand. Photographs carry a date in their file data; a photograph attached to its own entry keeps that date usefully attached to the description too.

Four fields, dozens of times over. That repetition is the entire argument for doing it on a phone.

How the app structures each room

The app takes you through the unit one room at a time, and within each room in a fixed order: walls, then ceiling, then floor, then fittings. A fixed route is the difference between a checklist and a wander. This covers the visual and functional checks you can make without instruments; the full inspection scope, including the instrumented tests, is on our what we check page.

• Entrance and doors: Every door opened, closed and locked with every key supplied, plus leaf finishes, frame gaps and the seal at the bottom of the main door.
• Living room and bedrooms: Walls read in raking light rather than head-on, the ceiling perimeter, floor tiles tap-tested, and every wardrobe and cabinet door.
• Kitchen: Taps run, the sink filled and drained, water poured near the floor trap, tiles tap-tested around the sink and hob, countertop and cabinetry.
• Bathrooms: Every tile tap-tested, walls included; water poured to see where it runs; floor trap, WC, taps, door seal, and the exhaust fan where one is fitted (otherwise the ventilation window or vent).
• Windows and glazing: Every casement opened and closed, locks and restrictors, glass, sealant beads, rubber seals, tracks and rollers.
• Service yard and balcony: Drainage to the trap, tiles, weather sealing at the door, the external tap, and the planter box and parapet.
• Electrical: Every socket tested with an inexpensive plug-in tester, plus switches, light fittings, ceiling fans and the air-conditioning if installed. Reverse polarity is common enough that we have written a separate piece on reverse-polarity sockets at handover.
• Household shelter: Door seal, swing, ventilation openings, internal surfaces and the certification labelling. Household shelters are governed by the Civil Defence Shelter Act 1997 and administered by the SCDF, and nothing about them should be altered.

The full room-by-room list, with what to bring on the day, is in our BTO handover checklist. Tap-testing in particular is worth reading up on first, in our guide to hollow tiles in Singapore homes.

A careful pass through all of this takes two to three hours in a typical three- or four-room flat, and longer in a larger unit. Collection day rarely allows for it: there is paperwork to sign and someone waiting. If you can only do one thing differently, go back on a second, quieter visit rather than trying to do it all on collection day.

Is the defect checklist app really free?

We are an inspection practice. The obvious move for us would have been to publish a PDF, put an email form in front of it, and leave it at that. We did not, for a plain reason: a PDF does not help anyone once they are standing in the flat, and we did not want to hand out something that fails at exactly the moment it is needed.

So the checklist became an app. You work through it room by room, add a photo to each item as you find it, and end with a single list sorted by location and category, the same shape as the form you will type it into afterwards. It is free, it is the whole checklist rather than a sample, and it uses the same room-by-room structure our own inspectors work in.

We are also not pretending this is charity. The app is how most people will first come across us, and some of them will later decide they want a person in the room. That is a fair trade, and it only works if the free thing is actually useful. It creates an account so your list is saved to you and still there on your second visit, which means we do end up with your name and contact details; that is the honest cost of it.

What the app can and can’t record for you

The app records what you can see, hear and test by hand: the paint, the tiling, the doors that scrape, the taps that drip, the sockets a plug-in tester flags. What it cannot do is the instrumented work: moisture and thermal readings, a controlled flood test, earth continuity and RCD verification. Nor can it tell you whether a particular crack is ordinary.

Whether that gap is worth paying to close depends on your unit and your week. We have set out both cases, including the situations where the honest answer is that you don’t need us, in our guide to doing your own defect check versus hiring a professional. Our own inspections start from $250, and the Essential and Comprehensive tiers are listed in full on the pricing page.

The timing, without the scare story

You will see a lot of copy insisting you have thirty days or you lose everything. That is not what the rules say. For a new HDB flat, the Defect Liability Period runs 12 months from key collection, and defects reported inside it are rectified by the project contractor at no cost to you. HDB's guidance is to report within the first month of key collection and before renovation begins — that is sound advice, and it is advice, not a cut-off. A defect reported in month nine is still a defect the contractor is obliged to put right.

The reason the first month matters is causation, not deadlines. Once your renovation contractor has been in the unit, it becomes far harder to establish whether a chipped tile or a cracked wall came from the original build or from the works you commissioned. Getting your list in before renovation starts keeps that question simple. For a private condo or EC, the equivalent 12-month period and the reporting arrangements are set out in your Sale & Purchase Agreement, and defects go to the developer; read the schedule in your own agreement rather than assuming the HDB process applies.

Documentation does not decide outcomes, and nobody can promise you it will. What a dated, itemised, photographed list does is make the conversation specific: this tile, this room, this date, this photograph. That is worth more than a longer list of vaguer entries.

This is a practical guide, not legal advice. Your Sale & Purchase Agreement and HDB's official process are the binding documents. When in doubt, refer to them.