Maintenance priority in high-rise housings: practitioners’ perspective versus actual practice

摘要

Residential buildings need proper building maintenance management to allow the residents live in comfort and building owners to preserve their properties. Apart from ensuring the safety of the residents, the aesthetic values of the building can also be preserved. Maintenance priority plays a vital role in enhancing the maintenance management process especially when the building managers face budget and cost constraint. It has been a challenging task for the decision maker to decide which maintenance work should come first. Many practitioner have been determining maintenance priority in a cursory manner simply based upon biased past experience, subjective or personal evaluation and conservative decisions and some even use a specific building maintenance manual by default without making a deliberated choice. Thus, this research seeks to investigate the differences between perspective and actual practice of practitioners in prioritising the maintenance of building facilities and services. A questionnaire survey was conducted among building maintenance personnel for high-rise residential buildings in Peninsular Malaysia with 321 valid questionnaire responses. Wilcoxon signed-rank test was performed to examine the difference between practitioners’ perspective and actual practice towards maintenance priority of building facilities and services. The findings revealed that facilities that deal with daily necessities and safety such as power supply, water supply, lift system and fire protection system were both ranked higher in practitioners’ perspective and actual practice compared to other facilities and services. It is also proven that there is significant difference between practitioners’ perspective and actual practice towards all building facilities and services.?