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Defect management is an important segment in building maintenance management. Although defect management requires systemic approach, the purpose of this paper is to focus on the measurement of defects in university buildings based on user perspective.

The paper reviews related literature and presents the outcome of a survey of 550 university buildings users, derived from a convenience sample from five universities.

A total of 20 defects were found to be very critical to the building users. Faulty electrical systems, faulty air conditioning system and roof damages were the defects requiring urgent maintenance. Based on the findings, it was concluded that resources be directed towards defects that affect security, safety and comfort.

The list of 32 defects may not be exhaustive, but are indicative of defects that affect university building performance. Because the buildings are not prototypes, some of the findings required adaptation. The conclusions were based on data from five universities.

This study is useful to maintenance organizations in efforts to increase users’ satisfaction, productivity and building performance by guiding resources allocation and at the same time reducing rework, dissatisfaction and waste. The findings would provide feedback and feed forward information and knowledge to the design and construction teams. The study provides a platform to integrate maintenance issues into the design and construction phases of building projects.

There is no such conclusive study on the maintenance of university buildings. Both academics and practitioners can apply the findings to their respective maintenance management scenarios.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the key aspects of building defects performance cases in relation to the building components focusing on the government-owned buildings and to enhance government’s role to curb the building defects to reoccur.

The qualitative research method approach was adopted with a total of 5,243 specific building defects identified and accumulated from actual building projects and provided feedback on the defects associated with the Government of Malaysia’s owned buildings.

This paper statistically validates that building defects are a staid delinquent matter fronting the construction industry in Malaysia. This matter needs to be tacked by all the parties involved in the industry. This paper proposes a factual statistical statement that is proved to be a practical and suitable measurement in correcting building defects and preventing them from reoccurring.

Future research could focus on developing a defect performance measurement on real projects now focusing on private buildings as well.

The defects performance statistical measurement is anticipated to prove the problematic rate of defects occurrence on government-owned structures, as the key elements on the national defect preventive strategy which have to be taken into account.

The outcome of this paper is significant in its own right and serves as a platform for future research in this area.

The largest share of a building maintenance budget goes towards preventing or repairing building defects. Also, building defects shorten a building’s lifetime, impact the user’s safety and health, prevent the buildings from performing their functions well and repairing building defects generates waste. Therefore, this study aims to specify the factors that affecting the number of building defects and how to reduce their negative impacts.

A case study was used as a research strategy and convergent parallel mixed methods were used as research design. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected concurrently, followed by independent analyses of the quantitative and qualitative data, and then merged the two sets of results according to the procedure of using the convergent parallel design. Descriptive statistics analysed quantitative data, whilst qualitative data was analysed by the content analysis technique.

The findings of this study explored the factors that affect the number of defects in buildings, the significant factors were related to the building’s life cycle in terms of design, construction, operation and maintenance phase; relevant attributes were construction teams, building users and maintenance teams. The study also addressed the approaches to minimise the negative impacts of those factors. Their negative impacts mainly contributed to increased building defects that increase maintenance costs, affect users’ safety and health, reduce buildings’ lifespan and cause environmental impact due to resource extraction.

The existing studies have not adequately addressed the significant factors that affect the number of building defects. Also, emerging technologies and environmental sustainability considerations related to building defects have not been linked in previous related work. Therefore, the present study has contributed to filling this gap.

A building deteriorates over time due to aging, wear and tear, and inadequate maintenance. Building diagnosis requires a sound knowledge of engineering, building defects, and detection tools to assess the condition of a building. The physical deterioration of a building reduces its ability to perform its intended function, while environmental deterioration influences the comfort and health of building occupants. This study presents a multi-tiered framework for the inspection of building elements and the environmental conditions of a building.

A three-tiered building inspection framework is proposed in this study, which consists of the following: Tier-I—a preliminary inspection, Tier-II—a detailed inspection, and Tier-III—an expert investigation. Each tier of inspection assesses the severity of building defects using different technologies for different levels of inspection.

Proposed multi-tier inspection framework is tested and implemented on a case study. Results were promising, with organized data management on a common platform for both physical and environmental condition inspection having the potential to save time.

The application program developed for the implementation of structured multi-tiered building inspection provides better documentation and data management for building inspection data that can save time involved in manual data operations in traditional paper-based processes.

The issue of building defects is a growing concern that affects all major construction stakeholders as a result of costs and time implications of reworks. The magnitude of the problem is severe with statistics highlighting defects often result in 4% of the total cost of construction of a building. Despite the importance of this problem, studies have seldom considered development of systematic approaches to enhance the quality control process in construction.

Building defects is a growing concern that affects all major construction stakeholders because of costs and time implications of reworks. Magnitude of the problem is severe with statistics highlighting defects often result in 4% of the total cost of construction of a building. Despite the importance, studies have seldom considered development of systematic approaches to enhance the quality control process in construction.

Results indicated that poor workmanship is the main cause of building defects and incomplete works is a frequently detected defect type. Results categorised defects based on cost and frequency to identify the severity. Findings also identified four focus areas including control measures, technology use audit and inspections and promotion of best knowledge.

The study lacks generalisation as it covers only Victorian scenario and further studies are needed to generalise the findings.

The study provides a deeper understanding of the challenges currently facing the residential construction industry in Victoria, Australia, and underlines the need for developing quantitative models and methodologies to improve current processes, practices and policies for effective defects minimisation in Victoria, Australia. The systematic methodological framework can also be adopted by researches across the globe to effectively analyse the options for minimising residential building defects.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the development of an integrated computerised maintenance management system to improve the information storage of design and construction, diagnostic and defect risk assessments on IBS building through the integration of building information modelling (BIM).

The methodology used interviews with the IBS building client/maintenance contractor in Malaysia to gather information about maintenance management problems, approaches to address problems, information and communication technology implementation and use of emerging technologies, in addition to prototyping a system development life cycle for system development.

Relevant process flowchart documents of system development were obtained from the case study and reviewed to assist in providing an automation technique for decision-making and structural defect diagnostic operation through the integration of Visual Basic.Net, MS Access and Autodesk Revit software.

This research focuses on automatic bidirectional communications between an Expert System and BIM on a database level. Adoption of the approaches suggested in the research will enable the system to promote the development of zero IBS building maintenance.

By adopting a condition‐dependent approach to maintenance, facility managers can exercise control over the desired maintenance performance levels and costs. The practice of condition assessment by building inspectors yielded variable results due to subjective perceptions of inspectors. Nowadays well‐trained building inspectors are able to manage condition surveys and provide property managers with objective, reliable information about performance loss and defects in building components. The implementation of various performance levels in planned maintenance requires not only the standardisation of the condition assessment method, but also the related planning methodology. This paper describes the findings from research in the Netherlands which examined the methodology of condition assessment of building components using a six‐point condition scale. Different categories of performance loss in maintenance are distinguished and linked to different kinds of maintenance activities.

The current maintenance management method has affected the efficiency of the building facility management at Polytechnics. Many issues such as poor service delivery, inadequate finance, poor maintenance planning and maintenance backlogs have emerged due to the usage of conventional method application (paper-based form and unsystematic database. The purpose of this paper is to review existing literature and case studies project of the technologies in maintenance management at Polytechnic, and subsequently to identify the challenge in improving the current maintenance management technologies.

The purpose of this paper is to review existing literature and case studies project of the technologies in maintenance management at Polytechnic, and subsequently to identify the challenges of information and communication technology (ICT) implementation for strategic defect diagnosis and decision-making in improving the current maintenance management technologies. Eight Polytechnics are selected on the basis of the major problems of using the conventional method in the comparison to investigate the maintenance management practices in each Polytechnic. There are around 32 Polytechnics in Malaysia and most are using conventional methods.

The findings reveal the need for a more sophisticated maintenance management system that provides guidelines for decision-making processes with the implementation of ICT. The interview results also reveal irregularities within the Malaysian Polytechnics’ maintenance management database. The system architecture and the information system prototype are presented to integrate the information database and maintenance management processes in improving the building diagnosis approach and decision-making process for managing building maintenance.

This new system is expected to become the successful technology in assisting the maintenance contractors, clients and developer for effective management of maintenance defects at Polytechnic.

The purpose of this paper is to present defects reported by cooperative owners, and to determine the relationship between building characteristics, developer’s/contractor’s company size and defect type.

The analysis is based on defects reported by board members of cooperatives in Sweden through a survey questionnaire. The 1,563 questionnaires were posted by regular mail to the boards of cooperatives for buildings. The current research presents results from analysis of responses from 394 regular residential projects constructed between 2006 and 2013. The responses represent owners’ experience from a total 1,107 buildings.

Findings presented in this study indicate that building quality might be one of the factors contributing to the energy gap. The analysis indicates that the most severe problems reported by cooperatives are issues related to building envelope, particularly shortcomings in the function of windows, issues related to the function of the balcony and cracks in the facade and leakage caused by rain water. The results show that the building quality differs depending on developers’ size, measured by number of employees. The authors have also found a significant relationship between reported defects and location expressed by size of the city/municipality.

The discussion on newly constructed residential buildings has been dominated by the perspective of professionals (inspectors) and contractors (or developers) rather than of the owners/users themselves. This study presents findings from the owners’ perspective, thus contributing the owners’ viewpoint to the debate on building quality.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the risks of building defects associated with rapid advancement of “green” construction technologies. It identifies the methods adopted by the sector for the determination of pre-construction defects that are framed within the context of, traditional; scientific; and professional design approaches. These are critically evaluated and utilised in attempts to mitigate defects arising from diffusing low carbon construction innovations.

The paper takes the form of an evaluative literature review. Polemic in orientation, the paper critically compares two periods of time associated with rapid advancement of innovation. The first, the post-Second World War housing boom is synonymous with a legacy of substandard buildings that in many cases rapidly deteriorated, requiring refurbishment or demolition shortly after construction. The second, is today’s “green” technology “shift” with its inherent uncertainty and increased risk of latent building defects and potential failure to deliver meaningful long-term performance. Central to this is an exploration of the drivers for innovation, and subsequent response, precautionary measures initiated, and the limitations of institutionalised systems to identify and mitigate defects. Similarities and differences between these historical periods frame a discussion around the theoretical approaches to defects and how these may be limited in contemporary low carbon construction. A conceptual framework is presented with the aim of enhancing the understanding for obviation of defects.

Sufficient commonality exists between the periods to initiate a heightened vigilance in the identification, evaluation and ideally the obviation of defects. Design evaluation is not expressly or sufficiently defect focused. It appears that limited real change in the ability to identify defects has occurred since the post-war period and the ability to predict the performance of innovative systems and materials is therefore questionable. Attempts to appraise defects are still embedded in the three principle approaches: traditional; scientific; and professional design. Each of these systems have positive characteristics and address defect mitigation within constrains imposed by their very nature. However, they all fail to address the full spectrum of conditions and design and constructional complexities that lead to defects. The positive characteristics of each system need to be recognised and brought together in an holistic system that offers tangible advantages. Additionally, independent design professionals insufficiently emphasise the importance of defect identification and holistic evaluation of problems in design failure are influenced by their professional training and education. A silo-based mentality with fragmentation of professional responsibility debases the efficacy of defect identification, and failure to work in a meaningful, collaborative cross professional manner hinders the defect eradication process.

Whilst forming a meaningful contribution to stimulate debate, further investigation is required to tangibly establish integrated approaches to identify and obviate defects.

The structured discussion and conclusions highlight areas of concern for industry practitioners, policy makers, regulators, industry researchers and academic researchers alike in addressing and realising a low carbon construction future. The lessons learned are not limited to a UK context and they have relevance internationally, particularly where rapid and significant growth is coupled with a need for carbon reduction and sustainable development such as the emerging economies in China, Brazil and India.

The carbon cost associated with addressing the consequences of emerging defects over time significantly jeopardises attempts to meet legally binding sustainability targets. This is a relatively new dimension and compounds the traditional economic and societal impacts of building failure. Clearly, blindly accepting this as “the cost of innovation without development” cannot be countenanced.

Much research has been undertaken to evaluate post-construction defects. The protocols and inherent complexities associated with the determination of pre-construction defects have to date been largely neglected. This work attempts to rectify this situation.