Investigation of Generic House Components and Their Practical Ways to Be Assessed by House Buyers During Defect Liability Period in Malaysia

The newly built residential house basically had undergone a period where any defects toward the house will be rectified by the particular developer. Defect Liability Period (DLP) which is commenced from the day of Vacant Possession (VP) by house owners generally in effect between eighteen (18) months and twenty-four (24) months. During DLP, new house owner has the right to issue any complaints regarding the quality of the said building. Unfortunately, complaints were believed to widespread in the recent era where profitability is the main concern to most of the developers. Since the quality of the finished product is of minor consideration, added with less knowledgeable new house owners on issues of house defect, the situation is going from bad to almost heedless. To add salt to the wound, scarcity on research and dissemination of knowledge were deemed to shut the issue until almost to no existence. Therefore, the research is taking a leap by focusing on sense perceptions of house components that received recurring complaints and providing corresponding practical ways to check for defects on behalf of new house owners. A mixed method of methodology has been imposed, starting with literature analysis, questionnaire survey, and structured interview, respectively. Questionnaire surveys were conducted using online distribution towards developers and contractors within southern states of Malaysia, namely; Johor, Melaka, and Negeri Sembilan. Meanwhile, the latter method was accomplished by interviewing several senior construction practitioners. In order to ease the analysis processes, SPSS, and NVivo were used as the main software. The findings suggest that, in terms of sense perceptions, house components consist of several important parts such as roof, walls, and floors, along with their sub-components. However, not all components received similar trend of complaints from the house buyers. Interestingly, most of the senior construction practitioners proposed several unique and unaware practical ways for defect identification, such as by using torch light, water, and other simple testing methods. This research contributes in that it embarks on application-based software as knowledge management and distribution effort, which is anchored on Android by Google Incorporation.