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Purpose -With increased architectural, design and functional requirements and complexities, maintaining a modern building can easily become a costly affair. There is much evidence in the literature review as well as from the factual data, showing the significant increase of the maintenance budget in the recent past. This is due to the fact that, these complexities eventually generate many deficiencies and difficulties and, in turn, creates a tremendous maintenance workload and an undue budget. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to discuss factors related to such issues in the form of risks involved in the maintainability of buildings and further, explore several strategies and industry actions at the industry level to resolve this burning problem. This paper is focused to address the condominium properties. Design/methodology/approach -This approach of investigation of the risk factors was based on exploring the causes of existing defects and problems, which tend to lower the maintainability. Existing literature, site observations/interviews and questionnaire surveys were used to gather the required data. Findings -There are 13 number of critical maintainability problems, 43 respective factors as "maintainability risk" factors and 12 subsequent industry actions for better maintainability, in the findings. In addition, nine maintainability strategies are explored based on the relevant risk conditions to enhance the maintainability at the organizational/project level and three industry motivators are extracted from the relevant industry actions. A simplified framework for maintainability is proposed based on the strategies and the industry actions.Research limitations/implications -The data collection has to be limited to the Colombo metropolitan region due to limited resources. Originality/value -The paper provides useful information to the designers, clients, facilities managers/maintenance managers and users, on maintainability issues related to condominiums. This information highlights the important risk conditions, strategies and industry motivators in order to minimize these problems. These findings may provide an opportunity to promote "highly maintainable buildings for the future".

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Purpose – The factors contributing to maintenance cost include the life-long environmental factors that the building is exposed to during its useful life as well as parameters relating to the design, construction and maintenance processes. The performance of risk associated with these factors decides the future maintenance requirements of buildings. Ignoring these risks factors generally result in high maintenance costs. The purpose of this paper is to identify the maintainability risk factors and their implications on maintenance costs. Design/methodology/approach – A survey based methodology was used to establish the risks factors of building maintainability. A sample of high-rise buildings was selected to evaluate these risk factors that were identified through an extensive literature review and survey of substantive experts. Further, these risks factors were applied to a real case study. Findings – A total of ten risk factors of maintainability were identified in relation to high-rise buildings. They were analyzed using a case study and the implications on maintenance cost were evaluated. The results show that there is a considerable reduction in maintenance cost when these risks are minimized. Research limitations/implications – The research was limited to the USA and its six biggest cities. The results presented are predominantly qualitative and the results rely on extensive evaluation. Originality/value – The paper provides useful information to the designers and users on the maintenance problems related to buildings. Also it highlights critical risk conditions that should be considered to minimize maintenance costs

If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. AbstractThis paper discusses some important findings from a research project on the maintainability of wet areas of high-rise nonresidential, buildings. The implications of six key factors of maintainability namely water-tightness, spatial, integrity, ventilation, material and plumbing on the occurrence of 14 most common defects found in wet areas were evaluated. Problem areas evaluated include water leakage from ceiling, staining/discolouration, paint defects, cracking/spalling of concrete, cracking/debonding of tiles, fungi/algae growth, pipe leakage and corrosion. An industry wide survey was conducted and the factors including workmanship, design detailing, maintenance and material incompatibility under tropical conditions are identified and discussed.