ApartmentsLeon Della BoscaFri 16 Oct 26
Opal Tower’s $50m Fix Comes Full Circle After Eight-Year Saga
Sydney’s Opal Tower has been officially declared defect-free at a ceremony this week, almost eight years after cracking concrete led to the evacuation of 392 apartments on Christmas Eve of 2018.
The milestone closes a saga that changed building rules in NSW and followed a class action, two legal cases and seven years of repairs.
Builder Icon and parent company Kajima spent more than $50 million fixing 500 defects. Major structural concrete repairs were done in 2019, with minor items such as the painting of planter boxes finished last year.
The 36-storey tower now carries a 20-year structural warranty, which Icon’s parent Kajima agreed to in 2019, up from the statutory six years.
All owners have been compensated and all legal matters resolved, according to the media reports.
After years as the focus of Sydney’s apartment defects crisis, the building has become an award winner. Judges at the 2026 NSW Apartment Awards for Excellence named it the Champion Award winner in June.
Repairs addressed cracking in the precast concrete walls and floors, centred on the facade’s “garden slots”, where precast panels joined structural columns.
The award capped what Opal Tower Owners Corporation chair Shady Eskander, who led the committee through the repairs and legal action, called “the greatest property comeback story in Australian history”.
“This award recognises not just a building, but the unwavering determination of a community to restore trust, safety and pride in their homes,” Eskander told media at the time.
Developed by Ecove, the tower at 88 Bennelong Parkway was completed in August, 2018. Its land is owned by the Sydney Olympic Park Authority, which made the state government a co-developer.
A 2019 report by three senior engineers, commissioned by the NSW government, blamed under-designed hob beams, lower-strength concrete and poor grouting for the cracking.
Those findings fed into reforms that created the role of NSW building commissioner and introduced the Design and Building Practitioners Act 2020.
Brought in by the then Coalition government, the changes require designers to declare that plans comply with the Building Code of Australia, and builders and developers to declare that work matches those designs.
NSW also passed the Residential Apartment Buildings Act 2020, giving the commissioner powers to stop work, order rectification and block occupation of buildings.
“Buildings are ultimately about confidence,” Eskander told media. “Once you have confidence in an asset, confidence in a market, values follow.”
He said the wider lesson was that “quality needs to be there so that defects aren’t”.
“We need to ensure that defects don’t occur in the towers that are being constructed over Sydney because builders and contractors will spend more on fixing defects than building it right the first time.”
