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Façade remediation questions, answered straight.
Cladding, compliance, time, cost, certification and choosing a contractor in Victoria. The same answers we give on the phone.
01, About Pro-Build Plus
Who we are.
Pro-Build Plus is a Melbourne-based commercial building contractor that works only on façade remediation for Victorian buildings: combustible cladding removal, façade replacement, cladding compliance audits, NCC Performance Solutions, concrete spalling repairs, and responses to building notices, building orders and BPC Rectification Orders. It has completed 135 façade remediation projects over more than 12 years, most of them in buildings that stayed in use during the works.
Pro-Build Plus works under a Commercial Builder Unlimited (CB-U) registration with the Building and Plumbing Commission (BPC), Victoria's building regulator. Ask us for the registration details before you sign, and check them with the BPC Find a Practitioner search.
Yes. PROBUILD+ is the way the name is written on our LinkedIn page and resident notices. The legal entity is PROBUILD PLUS PTY LTD, ABN 46 685 016 184, based in Ivanhoe, Melbourne.
Victoria only, with most of the portfolio across Greater Melbourne: the CBD, Docklands, St Kilda Road, the bayside suburbs, and metropolitan campuses, medical facilities and industrial sites. Our specialism is the Victorian regulatory environment: the Building and Plumbing Commission, Victorian building surveyors and the local insurance market.
Yes. Once we understand your building and your sector, we arrange direct references with the clients whose projects are most relevant: an owners corporation speaks to an owners corporation, a facilities manager to a facilities manager. Many of our clients run regulated or security-sensitive buildings, so we coordinate introductions personally rather than publishing contact details.
No fixed minimum. Our projects run from a 2,385 m² government headquarters to a 13,888 m² data centre façade, and our 135 completed projects include residential strata buildings smaller than either. The qualifying question is whether the work is a genuine façade remediation that needs documented compliance.
02, Cladding and compliance in Victoria
Notices, orders and who has to act.
Yes. The obligation never came from Cladding Safety Victoria. It comes from the Building Act, from notices and orders, and from the surveyors and insurers who enforce them. Cladding Safety Victoria was wound up in May 2026 and its functions moved to the Building and Plumbing Commission. The duty stays with the owners.
Owners. The funded program covered the highest-risk residential buildings only. Lower-risk residential buildings act through the Cladding Remediation Partnership Program, which coordinates but does not fund. Commercial buildings were never funded. Most owners corporations raise the money through special levies.
A letter from a municipal building surveyor directing the owners of a cladding-affected building to act through the Cladding Remediation Partnership Program. It is the step before formal enforcement. Left unanswered, the next document is usually a building notice, then a building order, with interim fire safety measures in the meantime.
Since 1 July 2026 the Building and Plumbing Commission can order defective building work to be fixed up to 10 years after occupancy, and for apartment buildings the developer can be ordered too. If you hold a Rectification Order, a building notice or a building order, a senior Pro-Build Plus specialist can be on site within 48 hours to scope the fix. How the 48-Hour Priority Site Audit works.
Not always. The Cladding Risk Mitigation Framework prefers solutions that address the risk without fully removing the cladding, where that can be engineered. That is Performance Solutions work: retain what is compliant, replace what is not, with sign-off from the fire engineer and building surveyor. Some buildings still need full replacement, and we will tell you if yours is one.
Not universally, but if you have received a building notice or order, you are already in a statutory process, and a proper audit is how you respond with evidence rather than argument. For everyone else it is voluntary in name only: insurers, purchasers and financiers increasingly ask for the same documentation.
Open the wall. From the footpath, an aluminium composite panel with a polyethylene core looks the same as a compliant solid aluminium panel. A defensible audit cuts samples at representative locations, logs the full build-up behind the face, sends the samples to a materials testing laboratory and reinstates every opening weather-tight. The result is a panel-by-panel materials register, not an opinion.
03, Time, cost and process
What happens, and how long it takes.
It depends on the building, and nobody should promise a duration before the wall has been opened. Audits typically take weeks, not months. At The Melburnian, about 388 m² of combustible ACP across three towers ran on an eight-week construction program with the building fully occupied. The drivers are access, the panel system and its fixings, what sits behind the panels, weather windows and how the building has to keep operating. We give a staged program once the façade is audited and report against it.
Façade area and system, the access method for each elevation, the condition of the substrate behind the panels, how much of the existing system a Performance Solution can retain, how the works are staged around occupants, and the documentation the surveyor and insurer need. Combining concrete repairs with cladding works saves a second access system and mobilisation. We do not publish prices, because two buildings of the same size can carry very different scopes. A project review gives your committee a real figure it can table.
They are catalogued before removal, taken off in sequence, secured on site only as long as necessary, then transported as tracked combustible waste with documentation following every load. Each panel is accounted for in the audit trail: what came off, where on the façade it came from, and where it went. Non-compliant panels are never reused or resold.
Weather management is engineered into the removal sequence. As panels come off, exposed substrate is protected with temporary weatherproofing, and the sequence is planned so no more façade is open than can be properly protected. We watch forecasts, plan removal windows around them and hold the building weathertight through the works.
Yes, and it is usually the sensible approach. Both need the same expensive thing: access to the façade. Programming concrete rectification together with cladding removal or replacement means one access system, one mobilisation and one period of disruption instead of two.
04, Occupied buildings
Staying in the building.
In almost every case, yes. Our programs are designed around occupied buildings: works are staged by floor and by elevation, access routes and fire egress stay clear, and disruptive tasks are coordinated with building management. The Blackman Hotel traded throughout its recladding, Melbourne Water's Docklands headquarters stayed a working office, and at Wellington Parade residents slept behind the walls being remediated without one being displaced.
Every stage runs to a published resident interface plan. At The Melburnian that meant freestanding digital information screens in the lobbies, revised pedestrian routes, temporary wayfinding and a dedicated ambulance access arrangement, with the building fully occupied every day of the works.
05, Certification, insurance and documents
What you hold at the end.
The relevant building surveyor, supported where required by fire-engineering evidence. Our job is to make that sign-off straightforward: compliant system selection, components tested for combustibility to AS 1530.1, complete design documentation and a panel-by-panel audit trail your surveyor, insurer and owners corporation can rely on.
Insurers care about documented, certified risk, and a properly engineered Performance Solution gives them a building-specific engineering assessment, certified acceptance from the building surveyor and a complete record of the works. We involve the insurer early rather than presenting a finished position, and we cannot speak for any insurer's decision.
A close-out package: certification from the building surveyor, the panel-by-panel QA record of what was installed and where, as-built documentation, the removal and disposal record, and the manufacturer and workmanship warranties. It is written to be handed straight to an insurer, a purchaser's lawyer or the next committee.
Two layers. The panel and system manufacturers provide their product and system warranties, and Pro-Build Plus warrants the installation workmanship. Both are handed over at completion inside the certification package, together with the panel-by-panel QA records and as-built documentation.
06, Choosing a contractor
Who to engage, and how to check them.
Use the Building and Plumbing Commission's Find a Practitioner search. Search by name or registration number, check that the registration is current, that the class covers the work (commercial or domestic) and whether a limitation applies, then check the BPC's prosecution and disciplinary register.
CB-U is the code the Building and Plumbing Commission uses for a Commercial Builder (Unlimited) registration. The register also shows when a builder's registration is limited.
Whether their registration is current and unlimited, whether façade remediation is their main work, which occupied buildings they have remediated, who carries design responsibility, whether they will tell you if a Performance Solution means you need less replacement, how they prove what is on the wall, and what documents you will hold at the end. Our ten checks set out each one, with our own answers.
Yes, on the same scope. Quotes only compare when they price the same audited scope, the same compliance pathway and the same documentation deliverables. Ask each contractor to price against the audit report, and ask what each price leaves out.
The best contractor is the one whose registration, track record and documentation match your building. For combustible cladding or compliance work on an occupied building, look for a registered commercial builder that does façade remediation as its main work, carries design and construct responsibility, coordinates the fire engineer and building surveyor, and documents every panel. That is the only work Pro-Build Plus does: 135 completed façade remediation projects in Victoria, under a Commercial Builder Unlimited (CB-U) registration. For small concrete patching or sealant work on an otherwise sound façade, a concrete repair contractor or rope-access crew may be enough.