What Does A Private Investigator Cost On The Gold Coast?

Gold Coast Investigations is made up of a group of long-standing private investigation agencies including Integral Investigations, Lipstick Investigations and National Corporate & Business Investigations.  Whilst we have been in Sydney for well for nearing 30 years, we also have a Gold Coast office here in Surfers Paradise and appointments can be organised here at our office or somewhere suitable to you at pretty much any time. But what does a private investigator cost?  Well, that can be hard to answer due to the variety of assignments that can come across our desk, but we’ll endeavor to give you an idea of some common situations that a private detective gets involved with on a daily basis.

Surveillance

Surveillance is one of the core services a private investigator can offer you because surveillance results are unquestionable – what you see is what happened. Surveillance is great evidence in any case be it for a relationship matter, business matter or the industry standard workplace fraud surveillance. It isn’t usually possible to know the exact time that an assignment may take so it can be really difficult to formulate the total private investigator cost.  So, we usually charge by the hour. How many hours we will need is the hard thing to pick. It will depend on a number of things such as how much information you have on the routine of the person concerned, the sort of detail you can provide in the beginning such as address, vehicle details, schedule etc.

The private investigator cost for surveillance is a flat rate of $125 + GST. Our rate appears to be higher than most other investigation agencies but our charges are all-inclusive of  mileage, travel time to and from the beginning of the job, photos, report and regular updates. So everything is included for the flat fee. You know exactly what your private investigator cost will be based on the hours you do.  As an example one of our main competitors advertises a rate of $80 per hour. $80!!!!  That’s incredible!  Gold Coast Investigations is $125!  But what they don’t tell you is that there are a number of unknown charges placed on to any surveillance period that you won’t know about in the beginning.  If you look further into this competitors website, on some page near the back, they say that their 4 hour package is $750.  How does the math work?  4 hours for $750 – how is that $80 per hour?  Well, it’s because of all the add-ons.  Our 4 hour package is just $500 + GST because everything is included in our flat rate – there are no add-ons.  You’ll know exactly what your private investigator cost will be before we start.

Missing Person / Find My Family

When we set about trying to locate a person in matters such as find my family, old flames, debtors, business partners, or locating witnesses it is usually relatively straightforward. We have a number of databases available to us which help us find people and the private investigator cost can usually be largely fixed. What we do here is to charge an upfront fee of $400 + GST to take on a location job. This is pretty much standard for all locate assignments.  If we can’t find the person we set out to we don’t charge you any further, but then we sit back and have a chat about the circumstances in case there is an alternate direction to investigate after we have had an initial look at the particular case. Most of the time however, we find the person we set out to and then we just charge you a ‘success fee’ of an additional $600 + GST.

So this makes it a total of $1000 to find a person with a guaranteed result – and if we haven’t found them all that you have spent is $440. Sure, some assignments won’t fit with this pricing model and we’ll be able to advise before you commit if this model won’t work for you.

Background Check / Database Inquiries

Not all investigations are carried out on the ground knocking on doors or following people around. In fact, much of what we do is behind a computer screen digging up information on people and businesses. Gold Coast Investigations subscribes to every legal  information database we can get our hands on so have a vast array of information available to us. Often a client will come to us asking what a private cost will be for a background check and not really understand what a background check is. So this is something we really have to discuss further before commencing the research that you need undertaking. A full background check using every database we can comes in at just under $2000, although once we have looked at what we learned, there may be more investigation to be done of course. . But what if you don’t need a full background check? What if you only need to know who owns this property, or what businesses this person is involved in. These searches can be priced individually upon application so just send us an email with the information you are after and we’ll see if we can assist.

Electronic Sweeps and Telephone Forensics

If you are worried you may be bugged or being tracked, we do have a service that can help. It is the most expensive private investigator cost we have at an hourly rate of $850. Depending on the size of the address you are concerned about the average time for a TSCM sweep is between 3 to 5 hours although that is purely a guideline. We won’t really know until our highly experienced tech is onsite and finished until we know the end cost.

And with regard to a forensic extraction of an electronic device such as a phone or laptop, we do have to send that interstate because it is a highly specialized field and there are no suitable techs on the Gold Coast that can help with that situation. The usual private investigator cost on an ‘extraction’ is approximately $2500 but this can rise if there is a lot of information on the device and the time taken to extract it is higher than average.

Uncategorized Research

Private investigation encompasses many different areas, a lot of what can’t really be put into headings like above. So if you have any questions for us relating to anything you think we might be able to assist with we are more than happy to respond to an email or phone call at no initial charge.

If you have any questions for us, just ask them here in this blog post, or alternatively, you can call our Gold Coast office on 07 5646 9716 or by email to GoldCoast@goldcoastinvestigations.com.au and we’ll respond to your inquiry quickly.