01What does the register actually say about Imperial Builders?
The Building and Plumbing Commission's Compliance and Enforcement Register carries an entry headed Immediate suspension of Imperial Builders Pty Ltd. It names the registration, CDB-U 51196, Domestic Builder (Unlimited), and gives a decision date of 31 August 2026.
The published grounds are three sentences. This is all of them.
The practitioner's registration is immediately suspended in the interests of the public pending the outcome to a show cause process. The immediate suspension took effect at 5:28pm on 31 August 2026. The immediate suspension will remain in place until otherwise revoked by instrument in writing by the Authority or unless otherwise ordered or stayed by the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT).
Building and Plumbing CommissionCompliance and Enforcement Register, record 29241, read 4 September 2026
The register states the power the Commission used. It does not state what the company is alleged to have done. There is no summary of conduct, no allegation, no complaint history and no finding. This article does not fill that gap with a guess. Where it describes what the law permits the Commission to weigh, that is the law, not an allegation about this company.
Directly beneath it sits a second entry, and it is the one most readers will miss.
Domestic Builder (Unlimited)
Domestic Builder (Limited)
Two separate entries, two separate registration numbers: the company's, and the personal registration of a director of that company. Both records give the same three sentences of grounds, and both record the suspension as taking effect at the same moment, 5:28pm on 31 August 2026. Neither says why.
That matters practically, and it is the reason the second entry is worth knowing about. A suspension that touched only the company would leave the person behind it free to build under another registration. This one did not.
Site Inspections pulled the full Compliance and Enforcement Register from the Commission's own endpoint on 4 September 2026. It held 950 records. Of those, 42 are immediate suspensions, and 15 of those carry a 2026 decision date. These two entries are the most recent immediate suspensions on the register.
02What is an immediate suspension, and is it a finding of guilt?
This is the part that most coverage of a suspended builder gets wrong, so it is worth being precise. The Commission draws the distinction itself.
Immediate suspension can occur before a disciplinary process is completed. It is a form of protective measure and is not a disciplinary action.
Building and Plumbing CommissionSuspension, cancellation and disqualification, read 4 September 2026
The power sits in section 180A of the Building Act 1993 (Vic). The subsection matching the register's wording is 180A(2A). The version in force on 31 August 2026 was authorised version 149; the passages quoted here are character-for-character identical in the current version 150.
The Authority must, by written notice given to a registered building practitioner, immediately suspend the registration of the registered building practitioner if the Authority considers it is in the interests of the public to do so pending the show cause process.
The Act then sets out, at s 180A(2B), the matters the Authority may have regard to in deciding whether that public interest test is met: whether the practitioner is performing or has performed building work that poses "a serious risk to neighbouring properties"; work that poses "a risk to the health and safety of persons"; or whether the practitioner "has been the subject of multiple adverse disciplinary actions by the Authority".
Those three matters are what section 180A(2B) permits the Commission to consider in any case at all. The register does not say which of them, if any, applied here. Treating the statutory list as a description of this builder's conduct would be exactly the error this section exists to prevent.
Four things run alongside the power, and they matter to the fairness of the picture.
So the matter is live. The company can answer the show cause notice, and it can ask VCAT to review or stay the decision. Until that period ends, or the suspension is revoked or set aside, the registration is suspended, and that, not the reason for it, is the fact a homeowner has to plan around.
03Why does an award tell you nothing about a builder's status today?
At the foot of every page on the company's website sits a row of three award claims, still displayed on 4 September 2026.
Those are the company's own published claims and are reproduced here as such. They have not been verified with the awarding body, and nothing in this article suggests they were not won.
That is the point. An award is a permanent record of one project in one year. A registration is a live status that can change at 5:28 on a Monday afternoon. A homeowner reading a builder's website in September 2026 is looking at a credential from 2015 and drawing a conclusion about 2026. The two are not the same kind of fact, and only one of them is checkable today.
No builder takes an award off their website, and there is no reason they should. The lesson is about where a homeowner looks. The awards row tells you what happened in 2012 and 2015. The register tells you what is true this morning.
04Does my insurance pay out if my builder is suspended?
This is where the practical damage sits, and almost nobody explains it. The insurance behind Victorian domestic building work responds to defined events, and which events depends entirely on when your contract was signed. The scheme changed on 1 July 2026.
If your contract was signed before 1 July 2026, you are under Domestic Building Insurance. The Commission's description of what DBI covers is narrow and specific.
For homes up to three storeys, DBI has generally provided cover of up to $300,000 for loss suffered because your builder: died / disappeared / became insolvent.
A suspension is none of the three events a DBI policy answers to. If your contract predates 1 July 2026 and your builder's registration has been suspended, the insurance behind your build does not, on that fact alone, give you anything to claim. That is our reading of the position the Commission publishes. Check your own certificate of insurance, and speak to the insurer about your policy.
If your eligible contract was signed on or after 1 July 2026, you are under Home Warranty, and the position is materially broader.
Home Warranty may provide broader protection than DBI. It may apply where eligible domestic building work is incomplete, defective or non-compliant and the builder fails or refuses to complete or fix the work. It is not limited to situations where the builder has died, disappeared or become insolvent. The maximum amount of assistance available under Home Warranty is $400,000 in total per home, subject to eligibility, limits and exclusions.
Each scheme as its own block. Read the one your contract date puts you in.
- Triggers: the builder died, disappeared, or became insolvent.
- Indicative cover: up to $300,000, for homes up to three storeys.
- Was required for domestic building work valued over $16,000.
- A suspension is not a trigger.
- Triggers include work that is incomplete, defective or non-compliant where the builder fails or refuses to complete or fix it.
- Maximum assistance: $400,000 in total per home, subject to eligibility, limits and exclusions.
- Applies to eligible work valued at more than $20,000.
- Expressly not limited to death, disappearance or insolvency.
The Commission states plainly that existing DBI policies continue under their current terms and conditions. An older contract is not moved onto the newer scheme because the newer scheme is better.
05What should I do this week?
If this is your builder, or any builder whose registration status has just changed, five things are worth doing before anything else.
- Find the date on your contract. Not the date work started, not the date of the permit. The date the contract was signed. It decides which insurance scheme you are in, and nothing else does.
- Find your certificate of insurance and read which scheme it names. The Commission runs an insurance search by property, and you can request an Insurance Information Statement if you cannot locate yours.
- Get the state of the build documented and dated now. Photographs, measurements, and what stage the work has actually reached. If completion or stage becomes an argument later, and after a suspension it very often does, that record is the only thing that fixes where the work had got to. It is worth far more taken this week than reconstructed in six months.
- Do not authorise a further progress payment until you know where your contract and your insurance stand. A payment made against a stage that has not been reached is very hard to recover.
- Get advice before further work proceeds under the contract. Section 169F(1) of the Building Act 1993 provides that "a person must not carry out domestic building work under a major domestic building contract unless the person is a registered builder or a licensed building employee". How that applies to your particular contract while a registration is suspended is a legal question, and the answer depends on your contract's own terms.
General information, not legal advice. Speak to a lawyer about your specific situation, and to your insurer about your specific policy. The statutory and regulator passages above are quoted; the reading of them is ours, and the sources at the end carry the official text.
06How do I check any builder in four minutes?
Two registers, not one. This is the part worth keeping long after this particular matter resolves.
A builder can look ordinary on the first while the second holds the reason. Check both, and check them by registration number rather than by name.
A search of the practitioner register for "Imperial" on 4 September 2026 returned three companies: Imperial Builders Pty Ltd (CDB-U 51196), Z & J Imperial Homes Pty Ltd (CDB-U 71263) and SDS Imperial Homes Pty Ltd (CDB-U 51793). The second and third are unrelated companies, and both were recorded as Current. Only CDB-U 51196 is the subject of this article. If you are checking a builder, match the registration number written on your contract. A name match is not an identification.
There is one more thing worth knowing, and it is the reason this section says both registers rather than a register.
Victoria also publishes a copy of the practitioner register as an open dataset, and a number of third-party lookups and comparison sites read from it. On 4 September 2026, three days after this suspension took effect, Site Inspections queried that dataset directly. It returned the registration as Current. The dataset's own metadata records it as last modified on 30 August 2026, two days before the decision.
An extract is a snapshot, and snapshots lag. But it means a homeowner checking a builder through a third-party lookup on an ordinary Thursday can be shown a status that is three days out of date on the single fact they were checking. The Commission's own register carried the suspension correctly the whole time.
So check the Commission's own register, and read the enforcement register beside it. Both are free and public. Site Inspections also runs a free lookup that checks a builder against both registers in one search, and it names the date its enforcement data was pulled rather than presenting it as though it were live. It never tells you a builder is clean, because roughly a third of enforcement records carry no registration number at all, and the Commission's own wording is that not every complaint, enquiry, inspection or compliance activity appears on the register.
If you have never done this before, we have written it up step by step: how to check a builder is registered. For the concept rather than this case, see what a suspended registration means for your build, and for the scheme that replaced DBI, the Home Warranty scheme. If your builder has gone further than suspension, making a Domestic Building Insurance claim covers the next step.
07Sources
- Building and Plumbing Commission, Compliance and Enforcement Register, entry Immediate suspension of Imperial Builders Pty Ltd (record 29241)
- Building and Plumbing Commission, Compliance and Enforcement Register, entry Immediate suspension of David George William Tankovich (record 29240)
- Building and Plumbing Commission, Compliance and Enforcement Register, complete pull
- Building and Plumbing Commission, Register of Building Practitioners, CDB-U 51196
- Building and Plumbing Commission, Suspension, cancellation and disqualification
- Building and Plumbing Commission, Domestic Building Insurance and Home Warranty
- Building Act 1993 (Vic), sections 169F, 180A, 180B and 182
- Victorian Building Practitioner Register, open dataset
- imperialbuilders.com.au
Written by Zeher Khalil, Building Consultant and Chief Inspector. Registration statuses change: everything above is the public record as at 4 September 2026, and anyone relying on it later should re-check the registers.
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