Australia's residential building faults : a view from the state of Victoria

Presented is an examination of residential building faults in the Australian Slate of Victoria. The aim is to determine the interconnections between identified main house faults., with a view to establishing their cause· effect relationships. A total of 42753 residential houses in Victoria were examined for nine key faults fully documented in Archicentre's database. These faults are: rising damp. framing fault, illegal building, stump fault, timber rot, cracking, electrical fault, roof fault and water supply issue. Second to framing fault, roof fault was found to be closely associated with other house faults examined. Hence, this paper concludes that a properly framed and roofed house could limit most of these faults. As illegal building was observed to have only a little overall association with other house faults, this study has implications for the Australia Productivity Commission's on-going efforts to deregulate various aspects of the building and construction industry professions.