BUILDING SURVEYORS

Building Surveyor

Building Surveyors

1.0 Background to the study

Building maintenance managers typically place great emphasis on the management of financial resources in controlling the quality of the physical asset. Underlying this is the implicit assumption that optimum effectiveness can be achieved by controlling finance. Most maintenance considerations (Spedding, 1990; Ngo, 1990) have placed much emphasis on budget-maintenance interaction rather than the actual “physiology of housing disrepair”. This has occurred to:

execute financial control in line with a maintenance expenditure budget.

satisfy the needs for accountability.

An earlier study by Holmes and Droop (1982) stated that “ maintenance is budget oriented rather than needs-oriented”. This led Ashworth and Au-Yeung (1987) to deduce that maintenance will only be carried out when and where the needs for maintenance and adequate funding co-exist. There has therefore been more emphasis on the size of maintenance budgets than the causes which give rise to maintenance needs, instead of developing a systematic maintenance framework. It has been said that the practical implication of built asset management must be judged on its ability to secure adequate funding (Then, 1990).

It is widely accepted that budget is a major maintenance function parameter, but caution has to be exercised in not ignoring other variables. A more inclusive view of the contributory factors in building/housing maintenance may be a reliable safeguard to prudent maintenance management. Some of these parameters have been identified by Ashworth and Au-Yeung (1987), namely: physical, performance, environmental, human, time and user characteristics. They schematically demonstrated the relationship between these factors on the basis of assumed expected relationships. Elsewhere, Ngo et al. (1990) found physical and environmental (location) characteristics to be significant factors in maintenance forecast, and went further by claiming the existence of a correlation between the two factors.

Based on data drawn from BRE maintenance cost returns, Wyatt (1980) has alluded to the fact that some house types cost more to maintain than others. This point corroborates the HMSO (1976) view that non-traditional blocks of flats built in the immediate post-war period are known to cost more in annual maintenance than traditional types of dwellings built at the same time. Wyatt further suggested that maintenance requirements are influenced by the actions and expectations of tenants in the public sector. He claimed this to be particularly true on unpopular estates where vandalism is rife and where occupancy turnover is high and councils are required to redecorate.

The influence of age of building on maintenance has been well documented (Alner and Fellow, 1990; Holmes, 1985). In his work, Holmes (1985) suggested that there are varying relationships between maintenance expenditure and age across building types and construction methods. Alner and Fellow (1990) also suggested the existence of a relationship between the age of school buildings and cost of maintaining them, and found that this relationship varied according to the construction method.

There are many factors which determine the condition of housing stock and hence its need for maintenance. One of the two most comprehensive lists of factors so far provided was by Honstede ...