While owners corporation’s rely on engineers and legal teams to advise on the complex decisions around defects, it is us, the defect coordinator and facilitator’s who manage the environment around defects and the unexpected complexities.
Mitigation options to deal with the environment associated with major defects comes with experience. This is the experience of understanding what particular defect remediation cause and effects will be, which needs to be understood well ahead of the scheduled works.
It is commonly thought that dust, noise and inconvenience are the only environmental affects of defects. For buildings with significant defects, psychological health of owners corporations is a discussion Grays Rescue finds ourselves having with our industry leaders and we are delighted to advise the industry is listening. Maybe it’s because of my experience in supporting the owners corporation of Mascot Towers since the unprecedented evacuation of the building; engineers dealing with major defects are reaching out to discuss the affects and the impacts their decisions are having on owners corporations.
Long after the remediation of defects is completed, an increasing number of owners corporations show a lack of appreciation for the remedial companies and the engineers doing their best to resolve the defects, quite often they are disgruntled by the experience. So what is going wrong, that owners corporations are feeling this way?
Well, every experience is different however, dig below the surface and there is a pattern where things start to go wrong, and often the relationships between builder or engineers never recover once the owners corporations are “put out”. More often than not, the facilitation process and the preparation of owners corporations is where it all goes wrong, and in many cases, it has nothing to do with the engineer or the remedial builder, their work is more often than not solid.
The fact is owners corporations are usually ill prepared for defect remediation, engineering processes and legal expert processes, and when it comes to defects and the natural agenda, instincts of saving money kick in. This is all good and well, but the first victim of saving money during defect facilitation is effective communications.
During defect investigations, effective communication between engineers, legal teams and defect facilitators is vital to navigate and sync the process’s and documentation. Unfortunately when an owners corporation decides to limit how the teams work together and communicate, double handling becomes the common element.
Another frustration most engineers and legal teams deal with is under qualified facilitation undertaken by onsite building management with no experience dealing with larger scale defects. Once the project is mobilised, it is often the building management dragging the chain of any facilitation, they are too inexperienced to manage, yet the frustrations are taken out on the engineer or the remedial builders.
The defects facilitation industry needs to grow, grow to a level that engineers, legal teams and remedial builders can have a clear crack at the job at hand, with facilitation foresight in place to reduce the environment cause and effects that lead to the usual road blocks and frustrations experienced by all parties, including owners corporations. From 2020 to today, Grays Rescue Building Management are proud to have delivered new benchmarks in building management excellence for defect facilitation. In 2022, Grays Rescue are ready to launch our new feature of our exclusive defect management software for monitoring and tracing of defects. Grays Rescue are proud to be considered a leader in innovation for defect facilitation.
