Maintainability risks of condominiums in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Purpose

With increased architectural, design and functional requirements and complexities, maintaining a modern building can easily become a costly affair. There is much evidence in the literature review as well as from the factual data, showing the significant increase of the maintenance budget in the recent past. This is due to the fact that, these complexities eventually generate many deficiencies and difficulties and, in turn, creates a tremendous maintenance workload and an undue budget. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to discuss factors related to such issues in the form of risks involved in the maintainability of buildings and further, explore several strategies and industry actions at the industry level to resolve this burning problem. This paper is focused to address the condominium properties.

Design/methodology/approach

This approach of investigation of the risk factors was based on exploring the causes of existing defects and problems, which tend to lower the maintainability. Existing literature, site observations/interviews and questionnaire surveys were used to gather the required data.

Findings

There are 13 number of critical maintainability problems, 43 respective factors as “maintainability risk” factors and 12 subsequent industry actions for better maintainability, in the findings. In addition, nine maintainability strategies are explored based on the relevant risk conditions to enhance the maintainability at the organizational/project level and three industry motivators are extracted from the relevant industry actions. A simplified framework for maintainability is proposed based on the strategies and the industry actions.

Research limitations/implications

The data collection has to be limited to the Colombo metropolitan region due to limited resources.

Originality/value

The paper provides useful information to the designers, clients, facilities managers/maintenance managers and users, on maintainability issues related to condominiums. This information highlights the important risk conditions, strategies and industry motivators in order to minimize these problems. These findings may provide an opportunity to promote “highly maintainable buildings for the future”.

Citation

de Silva, N. and Ranasinghe, M. (2010), "Maintainability risks of condominiums in Sri Lanka", Journal of Financial Management of Property and Construction, Vol. 15 No. 1, pp. 41-60. https://doi.org/10.1108/13664381011027971