The short answer
There is usually not much point in challenging an invalid notice. If a notice is defective — wrong details, wrong period, or served incorrectly — it is easily fixed by serving a corrected one, so the building owner loses little but a bit of time. And for an adjoining owner the practical point is this: once you appoint a surveyor under the Act, you are generally estopped from later arguing the notice was invalid, because you have treated the dispute as validly arising. So if you genuinely believe a notice is invalid, raise it quickly — but in most cases it changes nothing.
Why it matters
A valid notice must identify the building owner, give proper particulars of the work, state the correct period and a start date, and be served correctly under section 15. A defect can make it invalid — but the cure is simply to serve a fresh, compliant notice, so a validity challenge rarely stops, or even much delays, a project. The estoppel point is the important one: the courts have held that a party who participates in the statutory process — for example by appointing a surveyor — can be prevented from later denying the notice’s validity (the principle in Frances Holland School v Wassef). For a building owner, the message is to get it right first time, but to treat a slip as easily remedied. For an adjoining owner, if validity genuinely matters to you, take advice and act before you engage the process, because engaging it usually closes the point.
What to do now
- Building owner: if your notice is defective, simply serve a corrected one — quickly.
- Adjoining owner: if you think a notice is invalid, take advice and act before appointing a surveyor, as appointing one tends to estop the point.
- Don’t spend money fighting a notice that will just be re-served.
- If a dispute arises, a single agreed surveyor acting for both owners is the quicker, cheaper route — the one Coburns recommends.
Common mistakes
- Spending money challenging a notice that is simply re-served the next day.
- Appointing a surveyor and then trying to argue the notice was invalid.
- A building owner ignoring a known defect instead of re-serving cleanly.
When to call Coburns
We make sure notices are valid first time — and if you have received one you think is defective, we will tell you, plainly, whether it is worth raising.