Photos shared online by Sydney property consultant Edwin Almeida highlight the dodgy work and shortcuts that are rife in the construction industry, he says.

According to him, media reports about recent evacuations of residents from high-rise apartment buildings in Sydney are “just the tip of the iceberg” as a lack of oversight in the construction industry has led to high-rise “death traps” dotting city skylines across the country.

Photos, which Mr Almeida said were sent to him by tradesmen working on high rise apartment buildings in Queensland show leaky plumbing, crumbling support beams and disintegrating concrete slabs.

In some cases, the concrete has begun deteriorating before the building has even finished completion.

“It’s a mess, a lot of these buildings will need to get pulled down,” he told Yahoo News Australia. “They’re death traps.”

View photos Pictures shared by Mr Almeida on Twitter last week are reportedly from yet-to-be-completed high-rise buildings in Queensland, but are already showing serious signs of disrepair. Source: Twitter/Just Think Property More

2/2 and the here is a support beam ...at lest they are recycling their building waste #justsaying SAD AND DEVASTATING for off plan buyers and authorities not interested in investigating ... shameful & scary times for buyers of new apartments in Australia ... pic.twitter.com/3XlPIWLMsg — Just Think Property (@justthink1) June 20, 2019

“I’ve been exposing dodgy developments in buildings for many years,” Mr Almeida said.

“I’ve got somebody in there that worked in that complex for over a year,” he explained about the photos he shared.

“The only people left to expose this are those people working on site.” But complaints often don’t lead anywhere.

“They’ve been trying to expose this with the local authorities for a very long time, but it seems to fall on deaf ears,” Mr Almeida said.

Calls for inquiry into Australian ‘construction crisis’

Sydney has received much of the attention over shoddy building practices since residents were evacuated from Opal Tower in December and forced out of Mascot Tower last month due to structural issues.

While Sydney built more apartments than anywhere else during the recent real estate boom, Mr Almeida says serious problems exist in other cities and it’s simply a matter of time until more problem buildings become public.

“It’s a big problem in all states,” he said. “It’s not different in Melbourne, it’s not different in Brisbane.

“What you, I and the general public see, is just the tip of the iceberg.”

He believes there are plenty of body corporates battling with developers over major building defects but don’t want them to become public out of fear it will cause the value of their apartments to drop.

On Sunday, an apartment complex in Melbourne’s CBD was evacuated after a water main burst and flooded the basement and impacted the building’s electricity.

In recent weeks, coverage across the media has warned about the potential dangers of buying high rise apartments. And all this is happening at a time when a number of large projects are yet to be completed, prompting concerns over plummeting prices.

Philip Soos from LF Economics, and who has extensively studied fraud in the mortgage market, is among those who believe a Royal Commission in needed to address the issues faced by the industry.

This construction crisis affects not only large apartment complexes but also smaller complexes, houses and townhouses, especially for those built after 2000 through to today. Expect sales for off the plan and newly built dwellings to continue to plummet. — Philip Soos (@PhilipSoos) June 23, 2019

Standards are high, but enforcement is not

Many industry observers point to deregulation in recent decades and the privatisation of building certifiers in NSW, meaning certification is done by private contractors engaged by the developer rather than an independent government body, as part of the problem.

“The funny thing is that we have very high standards. Compared to the rest of the world we have very high standards,” Mr Almeida said. “But they’re not adhered to.

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