Building Industry – Winds of Change | Prendos New Zealand ltd - property valuation-quantity surveying-remedial design-dispute resolution-leaky home

By Greg O’Sullivan

This forthcoming year will see the biggest change to the Building Industry that we have seen in its history in New Zealand. The new Building Bill will introduce tighter controls on construction and also performance requirements for those involved in inspecting. Registration will be mandatory for all key construction personnel. This will be a true registration, not the present registrations that purport to do the same thing. In other words, the individuals who supervise or otherwise directly control the sites, designs, and thus the quality of the end product will now be required to be licensed building practitioners under the control of a regulatory board.

In addition, we will see the most comprehensive change to the way claddings, particularly monolithic (plaster styles), are applied to buildings. Treatment of timber will become a must and huge strides will be made to turn the industry around. Both the government and the industry should be congratulated for their recent efforts. This does not mean an end to the leaky building problem, for many of the buildings that have been built over the last decade will slowly show up as problem construction over the next ten to fifteen years.

What will this mean to the general public? Confidence in the future. In the main the transition, I believe, will be relatively seamless and many people will be unaware that it is even occurring. I personally feel sad for the many people that have and will be caught by this decade of poor construction practice. Nevertheless it is gratifying to see that the rot can be stopped at this point.

Greg O’Sullivan is the founding director of Prendos Limited and an expert in the area of building failure and in particular, weathertight issues and has, in the past, highlighted to the industry many of the material failures occurring with products used to clad buildings. He is a Registered Building Surveyor, Immediate Past President of the Institute of Building Surveyors and a Founding Member of that Institute, BRANZ Accredited Adviser, Fellow of the Arbitrators’ and Mediators’ Institute of New Zealand and sits on both Mediation and Arbitration Panels and is on the Advanced Panel for Mediation with LEADR.

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