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The lack of attention to quality control by house builders in the Australian State of Victoria has been a contentious issue for more than two decades. In an attempt to improve the quality of housing, various mechanisms have been adopted and discarded by industry‐based organisations and government legislation. While builders are encouraged to improve construction quality, little is known and published about the quality of housing produced by owner builders. This paper presents findings from an ongoing research project that compares the defects in houses built by owner builders with those of registered builders. The initial findings suggest that there is no significant difference between the quality of housing procured by owner builders and registered builders. The functional elements within a house where defects are likely to occur are identified and discussed. The paper concludes by suggesting that the use of a registered builder’s management expertise does not necessarily guarantee a better quality product.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how the data collected by the House Builders Federation (HBF)/National House Building Council (NHBC) surveys are used in practice to improve the service provided to the customers, the transition of any changes into practice and the overall management of the customer satisfaction process by the builder.

A qualitative approach to the research was adopted, and the findings from the interviews provide an indication of the views from a range of private/speculative house builders relating to the areas of customer satisfaction and the ratings provided through industry-based surveys.

This paper has uncovered the views and opinions of private house builders relating to customer satisfaction and five-star ratings. The findings provide evidence that the house building industry is not fully engaged with the HBF five-star-related concept and that they provide a differing level of service in relation to customer satisfaction.

The research concluded that the customer can be manipulated by the builders in some cases causing a bias in the market; on the whole, the customer satisfaction surveys and star rating are simply seen as a marketing tool, used by the builders marketing department as a sign of quality and a way to promote the company.

This paper is of interest to private house builders and the wider construction industry and will aid their understanding of not only generic customer satisfaction but also in particular customer satisfaction in new build housing and quality-related ratings/targets applied by industry bodies.

The paper provides an insight to house builders practices by examining the use of the HBF/NHBC survey results and how they are used to manage and improve the service provided to the customer, and the results therefore are of value to the end home buyer and the wider house building industry.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the adoption process of high performance building technologies, including alternative wall systems, in hot‐humid climates. Challenges faced by homebuilders adopting high performance building technologies, and resulting energy performance are discussed.

The paper is a case study of four homebuilders using high performance building technologies, including advanced framing, panelised and modular. For each homebuilder, a baseline and a demonstration house were evaluated for energy performance and technology adoption. Homebuilders were interviewed to identify implementation challenges and barriers faced during the construction process.

The advanced framing, modular and panelised houses used 50 percent, 42 percent, and 35 percent less energy when compared to the traditional stick‐built. Further, the modular appeared to have the greatest opportunity to boost performance for least cost. Participating builders identified cost as the top constraint to a wide adoption of high performance criteria, followed by a slow learning curve and the lack of proper marketing channels to transition from construction to sale.

Several limitations of the research restrict generalisation of findings: results are based on a small sample of homebuilders; and results reflect energy performance in a hot and humid climate. It is likely that relative energy usage will change as the size, scope, and design complexity of the common element changes.

Findings from this study will contribute to a better understanding of the usability of high performance technologies and ease the transition towards implementing high performance criteria into every builder company's culture.

Builders have a long history of a public perception of poor image and low quality products. Political and administrative demands for builder registration and tighter control of entry into the industry have been seen to be the solution to these problems. However, progress towards registration and control has proved elusive. Recently, the state of Victoria in Australia introduced mandatory builder registration under its Building Control Act 1993. Further reform for the housing industry was introduced in 1996 through the Domestic Building Contracts and Tribunal Act 1995. As the first legislation of its kind in Australia, the Victorian experience provides a case study for similar developments elsewhere. This paper reviews the history of builder registration in Victoria and identifies the major provisions of the 1995 Act, including the organisations established to regulate and supervise the implementation of the legislation. The perceived drawbacks and benefits of the new system are also analysed following the limited experience since the introduction of the legislation.

A survey of computer use in the British house building industry was conducted by means of a postal questionnaire to 100 house builders followed‐up by in‐depth interviews. The research shows widely variant levels of computer use and expertise in different house building companies amongst both regional developers and the nationwide volume builders. Some housing developers have sophisticated information technology strategies and are well placed to successfully implement advanced techniques whilst many have very little or no computer use for design and visualization and rely more on traditional competitive strategies.

The purpose of this paper is to consider decisions of the courts of three jurisdictions: Ireland; England and Wales; and Australia, in relation to recovery of economic loss in negligence for building defects and to identify the extent to which the legal environment of each jurisdiction has informed the approach of the courts to the issue.

The approach taken for this purpose is to review the extent of legislative intervention in each jurisdiction to provide measures of protection for home buyers, and whether that intervention has limited the scope of what may be recovered in negligence for defects.

The findings of the research indicate that the retreat from recovery for defects, led by the courts of England and Wales through a series of cases in the 1980s and 1990s, may be regarded in part as a product of their environment, and that legislative intervention in the area of remedies acted as a limitation on the scope of the duties that the courts were prepared to impose.

Although the issue of recovery for building defects in negligence has been covered extensively in the literature and jurisprudence, the cross-referencing of the common law position with the legislative context in the jurisdictions considered provides insights into the approaches of courts and why the position of the courts of England and Wales may not transpose comfortably to other jurisdictions.

Ankara has experienced a recent rapid increase of residential communities that promise residents a comfortable lifestyle with strictly controlled entrances and several amenities. These luxury residential developments come in different forms, and are distributed unevenly across Ankara’s neighborhoods. Some neighborhoods become the center of gravity, and act like a magnet for these high-cost residential developments; however, most developers avoid making such costly investments in some other neighborhoods, which leads to an unfair distribution of profit across different locations in Ankara. The purpose of this paper is to examine the different factors affecting the site selection of different types of these real estate developments.

The aim of this study has been to examine the factors affecting the site selection of different types of access-restricted housing developments through a multiple discriminant analysis (DA).

The results of the analysis revealed that distance from the city center and the unit price of the current housing stock are associated with high scores in the discrimination of neighborhoods of different types of residential communities.

This paper implied a DA to create a better understanding of the site selection criteria behind access-restricted housing developments for policy makers to make better investment and management decisions.

The paper discusses the factors affecting the site selection of access-restricted residential communities in Ankara in order to show uneven distribution of profit across different locations caused by these developments.

On 1st April, 1988, the National House‐building Council (NHBC) introduced its new improved ten‐year scheme, the ‘Build‐mark’, which gives ten years protection for new homes. The scheme has been simplified in both language and presentation to make it more understandable for the home buyer and builder. A new procedure has been introduced to reduce the paper‐work for builders, purchasers and their respective solicitors or licensed conveyancers. Finally, the cover has been improved.

Discusses the background to the management of sheltered housing for sale, the main problems of management identified, the solutions proposed, the issues for management organizations, and the main points of the code of practice for the management of sheltered housing for sale introduced in 1989. Concludes that while the cost of implementing the code′s proposals will be passed on to lessees, cheap management is not appreciated so the image of residential property management should be improved: if not, more radical solutions will be called for.

Maximising the benefit of learning from defects is regarded by UK housing associations (HAs) as a key opportunity to meet their challenges of building more homes with reduced government funding and rent incomes. Despite learning from defects being a frequent recommendation to reduce defects in the construction literature, there is scarce empirical evidence into how HAs actually learn from defects. The purpose of this paper is to better understand how HAs learn from past defects and induce change to reduce defects.

Guided by organisational learning (OL) as the theoretical lens, a 21-month action research (AR) project explored one HA’s defects management and learning processes.

OL has the potential to reduce defects in new homes but is a secondary task which is reliant on a defects management team analysing defect data to identify priority areas. As such, learning from defects can be reduced due to peaks in workload if data analysis is a manual process. Furthermore, a dual learning approach plays a significant role for HA’s learning consisting of designing out defects (codification) supported by networking (personalisation) to tackle issues of workmanship on site and those defects that cannot be designed out.

This study demonstrates OL has the potential to reduce defects in new homes but is a secondary task in HA’s practice; and highlights the practical challenges of academia and industry co-production in AR in construction.