Independent property reports and services from a vetted panel of experts.
On any given Saturday in Sydney, five people can stand in the same living room, tap the same skirting boards, and worry about the same suspicious crack above the same doorframe. Then four of them go home empty-handed - and, until recently, all five had paid a separate inspector to tell them the same thing about the same house. Rhys Rogers noticed that waste from the inside of an accounting and restructuring firm, and it became the entire reason Before You Buy exists.
Founded in 2015 as "Before You Bid" by brothers Rhys and Jordan Rogers, the company set out to fix a quietly expensive quirk of Australian property: everyone who is serious about a home pays, on their own, for due diligence that only one of them will ever use. Eleven years later it operates what it calls the country's largest property due-diligence platform, connecting buyers, sellers and agents with a vetted panel of independent, insured inspectors.
The insight is almost annoyingly simple. A building & pest report describes a property, not a buyer. So if the property does not change between Tuesday and Saturday, neither does the report. Before You Buy built its business around that fact with a share-cost model: when more than one buyer wants the same report on the same home, they split the cost. As additional buyers order it, the price drops - and the people who paid earlier are refunded the difference.
Sellers can start the process too. A vendor who commissions an upfront building & pest or strata report puts it on the listing, every interested buyer chips in, and the seller can recoup much of the cost while giving bidders confidence before auction day. It turns a private, repeated expense into something closer to a shared utility.
Property buying in Australia scatters its paperwork across a dozen professionals. Before You Buy pulls the common ones into a single marketplace, each delivered by a qualified, insured member of its panel.
The company distributes roughly 90,000 strata reports a year, which has given it an unusually close view of where property transactions go wrong - and why apartment buyers, who often assume strata living exempts them from due diligence, get caught out most.
Before You Buy sits between everyone who touches a sale. Buyers get institutional-quality due diligence at a first-home-buyer price. Sellers de-risk their listing and share the cost. Agents attach reports to a listing to move it faster, and buyer's agents plug into the same marketplace. It is B2C, direct-to-consumer and B2B at once, spread across six Australian states and territories.
A buyer or seller kicks off an order on a specific property.
If a report already exists, later buyers pay a shared, discounted rate.
A vetted panel inspector completes the report to a consistent standard.
As more buyers join, the price drops and earlier payers get money back.
Most of the inspection industry is still a phone book of independent operators, each quoting a full fee for a single job. Report-search and strata providers exist, but few combine a national inspector network, a full stack of report types and a pricing mechanic that actively pushes costs down. That combination - marketplace plus refund - is Before You Buy's moat, and it is the part other founders in adjacent markets would most want to copy.
The money has followed the idea. In March 2022 the company raised roughly AUD $5 million in a Series B, backed by returning investors including New Zealand's Gillespie family and Square 1 Group. Co-founder Rhys Rogers was named a finalist for Industry Leader of the Year at the 2024 REB Awards, and the platform has since collected wins and nominations at the 2026 Proptech Awards.
The rename from "Before You Bid" to "Before You Buy" is a small tell about ambition. The auction paddle was the original moment - read the report before you raise your hand. The new name reaches wider: any property decision, before you settle in. For a business built on a duplicated PDF, it is a fitting place to end up - selling not reports, exactly, but the confidence to sign.