Real estate and the Contaminated Sites Act 2003

We advise you to conduct a site contamination search if you buying, selling, leasing or valuing land.
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Pre-sale or lease enquiries

Investigating and cleaning up contaminated sites is expensive.

If you are involved in buying, selling, leasing or valuing land, we advise you to include site contamination searches as part of your enquiries.

This can be done by:

  1. Searching our Contaminated Sites Database to check if contamination has been confirmed at the property (this information is also available via a Landgate property interest report). If the online search returns ‘no matches found’ or the Landgate report returns ‘nil report’ it does not mean the property is uncontaminated.
  2. If nil return/no matches from step 1, submit a Form 2 to us to find out if the site has been reported as a known or suspected contaminated site and if investigation or clean-up is required.

Only information on sites with known contamination is available online (about 700 sites). Submit a Form 2 to us to search the full reported sites register of more than 4,600 sites.

The chart below illustrates the proportion of reported sites available via the online Contaminated Sites Database or Landgate property interest report.

 

Basic summary of records (BSR)

A basic summary of records describes the nature and extent of known and suspected contamination affecting the land and/or groundwater.

It also provides information on applicable restrictions such as on building construction, abstraction of groundwater or when undertaking intrusive maintenance works due to the presence of contamination. 

How to obtain a BSR for any property in Western Australia

Access option Information available Time frame How to access

Our public contaminated sites database

BSR for classified sites with confirmed contamination (excludes sites with possible and suspected contamination)

immediate

Contaminated Sites Database
no fee

Landgate property interest report

BSR for classified sites with confirmed contamination (excludes sites with possible and suspected contamination)1

~60 minutes

Landgate website
fees apply

Basic summary of records (BSR) request to us

BSR for all classified sites2

10–15 working days

Submit a Form 2
$44 fee

1 For all other sites the property interest report returns a ‘nil response’ and the applicant is directed to request a BSR via submission of a Form 2. 

2 If a BSR request is received for a site that is awaiting classification, we will notify the applicant, prioritise classification of the site and provide the full response when the site has been classified.