Post occupancy defects in public office buildings in Nairobi city the causes and ratings

Abstract

An insight into the budgets for maintenance programmes for Public Office Buildings in Kenya and many other d eveloping countries reveals budgetary deficits leading to ever increasing defects backlog. The major consequence of this sad situation is the unchecked deteriorated state of the public office buildings stock resulting to disruption of delivery of public services through equipment breakdowns and/or building element or component failures. The aim of this study is therefore to determine and rate causes of common buildings defects with a view of formulating appropriate strategies for managing them. The common buildings defects were established through inspections of sampled public office buildings located in the Nairobi City. A qualitative research strategy was crafted to obtain perceptions of sampled maintenance experts in the public sector on eight possible ca uses of buildings defects. The ranking of the eight possible causes was analysed in a Likert Scale of 1 in 8 through computation of the mean item scores. The findings established that poor supervision, negligence, vandalism and design deficiency are major contributors to common defects. The findings are expected to aid policy makers put in place preventive strategies to address the root causes of common defects with the purpose of drastically minimizing scope of defects and maintenance budgets