A factor approach to analysis of home maintenance outcomes and attributes of management successes in the owner‐occupied sector

Abstract

This paper seeks to explore and detect underlying relationships between identifiable attributes that are influential to successful outcomes of home maintenance activities. The study's approach is to identify, from the perspective of owner‐occupiers, the attributes that are influential on the successful outcomes of home maintenance activities. The study is primarily based on 186 questionnaire responses from a stratified random sample of owner‐occupiers taken from 12 local authority wards identified on the basis of a Ward Index of Multiple Deprivation. The intercorrelations among the attributes influential to the outcomes of home maintenance activities demanded the application of principal component analysis to determine the factors perceived to dictate home maintenance outcomes. This resulted in the extraction of nine significant factors, which combine to exert their influence on the quality of the maintenance activities in the owner‐occupied sector.

Does owner heterogeneity matter in the management of multi-owned housing?

“…An adequate level of knowledge enables an owner to identify the early defects in his/her residence and take proper actions to remedy them in time (Angwa & Olubodun, 2003;Kangwa & Olubodun, 2003). Therefore, if owners have common knowledge of management issues, then they can communicate easily with each other and make prompt decisions on those issues.…”

Collective action in apartment building management in Hong Kong

“…During economic recessions, owners may tend to cut maintenance costs (Lai & Yik, 2004). Constrained by their knowledge of building maintenance, owners may have difficulty monitoring service providers' performance effectively (Angwa & Olubodun, 2003).…”

Improvement‐led home maintenance strategies and quality expectations

“…Yet still, at the owner‐occupier level, repair and maintenance actions among owner‐occupiers are expressively improvement and refurbishment‐led both in scope and character (Kangwa and Olubodun, 2003a; 2004a, b) DETR, 2000a ; Kangwa, 2005). It equally, notable from housing regeneration literature that, within the description of owner‐occupiers' maintenance decision process, ineffective diagnosis and prognosis of house defects is not only widespread (Kangwa and Olubodun, 2005) but chronic (Singh, 1994; Watt, 1999).…”

“…However, in order to achieve these objectives, it is acknowledged that many variables will combine to give rise to the ongoing concerns the UK government has about the rising cost and backlog of housing disrepair in the owner‐occupied sector. In the same vein these concerns are said to mirror the expectations and limitations that owner‐occupiers experience in dealing with housing defects to their homes (Kangwa and Olubodun, 2005, 2006)…”

“…In the UK, since the early 1980s, home ownership has been on a steady growth. However, notwithstanding the size and importance of the owner‐occupier sector to the UK economy, it is notable that within housing regeneration programmes, there remains a correspondingly low amount of research dedicated not only to the treatment of the physical housing infrastructure but also proffer, to owner‐occupiers, better methods of sustaining the quality of the existing housing stock (DTLR, 2002; Kangwa and Olubodun, 1999, 2006). As a result of this limitation, it is important that a community‐led housing regeneration agenda, especially one that embraces pro‐maintenance, refurbishment and home improvement management domains, is advocated.…”