The council's planning and environment committee approved a timeline for the review at its final meeting last year.
It could be November before a revised policy is adopted by the council.
The timeframe includes a period of public consultation.
Planning and environment committee chairwoman Cr Kate Wilson said Dunedin's policy was "out of kilter" with those of other councils and the council wanted to bring it into line.
The present policy was adopted in 2006 and, by law, must be updated every five years.
A softened version was adopted following various concerns raised at the time, but the new policy had to be centred on protecting the city's assets, she said.
Also, the present policy covered everything except residential properties and she felt there was some room for it to be widened.
The council's planning and building control departments have been working on the new policy for about six months.
Chief building control officer Neil McLeod said the new policy would amalgamate the best parts of other councils' new policies.
He said he could not comment on the content of the new policy, which was not even in a draft form yet, but that staff were reviewing "everything" and were being informed by best practice and what other councils had done.
Other councils that reviewed their dangerous and insanitary building policies recently retained them in their previous state - which is the same as the Dunedin City Council's present policy - that the council only identifies and assesses dangerous and insanitary buildings on advice from the general public or the NZ Fire Service.
There have, however, been significant changes to earthquake-prone building policies.
The Wellington City Council's policy, for example, is to have its own engineers make initial assessments of buildings an assessment on paper has deemed could be earthquake-prone, at the council's cost.
In Christchurch, council officials have the option to make their own initial and detailed assessments of buildings.
In Christchurch and Gisborne, where there have recently been large earthquakes, owners of earthquake-prone buildings have been - or inChristchurch's case will be from July 2012 - set a new target of strengthening their buildings to 67% of present building code requirements.
The Southland District Council is consulting on doing the same from July next year.
Other councils have a target of strengthening earthquake-prone buildings to 33% of present building code requirements.
