A twelve-month Slop University cohort study of tape-marked items at new-build handovers finds that half never enter the builder's own defect list, and that entering it is what predicts repair.
1,148 items marked with tape at 96 handovers and followed for a year, against the record the builder keeps of them
The count a site manager writes down at the end of a handover walk-through is the figure a project-home builder reports as its build quality. It is also, on evidence entered into the University’s repository today, the figure that decides which of a new house’s faults get fixed.
Settled With a Nod follows 1,148 items across 96 handovers at four estates. Every strip of tape a purchaser pressed to a wall, a door frame or a window reveal was photographed and numbered on the day, independently of the builder’s own list, and then tracked for twelve months.
Dwellings averaged 6.2 recorded items against 12.0 observed, and the two counts barely track one another. Of the 1,148 items, 596 reached no list at all. Those that did were rectified inside the year in 78.4 per cent of cases; those that did not, in 31.2.
We can say which items got fixed. We are not yet in a position to say what any of it means for a house at two years, and the School would rather wait for that than guess at it now.
— Dr Thandiwe Solberg, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Demo Quarter
Site managers sitting in the top quartile of the builder’s own indicator recorded a median 4.1 items on walk-throughs where the researchers recorded 11.8.
Dr Marit Osayande, Convenor of the Living Dashboard, welcomed the poster as “a study about a list, which is not the same thing as a study about a house, and knows the difference”.
The University sets the work within a wider interest in figures whose accuracy rests with the person they grade, and expects the form to turn up well outside residential construction.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.t9pa13.