ANALYSIS OF BUILDING DEFECTS AT RESIDENTIAL COLLEGES: A CASE STUDY AT HIGHER EDUCATION FACILITIES

Residential colleges are where students spend a significant amount of time at university. The university’s maintenance team must keep the building facilities in good condition to ensure the safety and comfort of the students and staff as well as to protect the university’s reputation. However, with today’s economic challenges, management frequently encounters difficulties in maintaining the buildings, resulting in the high number of complaints from building users. As a result, early detection of complaint trends is critical in reducing issues. Based on user complaints and the ‘learning from failure’ philosophy, the main aim of this study is to identify the most common complaint of building defects in residential colleges. The scope of the study is limited to 9 residential colleges from one (1) Malaysian public university. Complaints from 2012 to 2017 due to defects were categorized into 3 main areas of civil, electrical and mechanical. From here, the most frequent complaints from these categories were then identified. From the findings of this study, defects under civil received the highest number of complaints (62%), followed by defects under electrical (35%) and mechanical (3%). Under the category of civil, most defects were reported due to damage component, leaking and clogging. The solutions emphasize the importance of quality control, on improving workmanship, increasing building occupants’ awareness level, and improving complaints management. Overall, this study is significant when constructing new buildings because it provides information to the operation team as early as the design stage to consider the possibility of future maintenance activities, and planning improvement.