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 housewill be rectified by the particular developer. Defect Liability Period (DLP) which is commenced fromthe day of Vacant Possession (VP) by house owners generally in effect between eighteen (18) monthsand twenty-four (24) months. During DLP, new house owner has the right to issue any complaintsregarding the quality of the said building. Unfortunately, complaints were believed to widespread inthe recent era where profitability is the main concern to most of the developers. Since the quality of thefinished product is of minor consideration, added with less knowledgeable new house owners on issuesof house defect, the situation is going from bad to almost heedless. To add salt to the wound, scarcityon research and dissemination of knowledge were deemed to shut the issue until almost to noexistence. Therefore, the research is taking a leap by focusing on sense perceptions house componentsthat received recurring complaints and providing corresponding practical ways to check for defects onbehalf of new house owners. A mixed method of methodology has been imposed, starting withliterature analysis, questionnaire survey, and structured interview, respectively. Questionnaire surveyswere conducted using online distribution towards developers and contractors within southern states ofMalaysia, namely; Johor, Melaka, and Negeri Sembilan. Meanwhile, the latter method wasaccomplished by interviewing several senior construction practitioners. In order to ease the analysisprocesses, SPSS, and NVivo were used as the main software. The findings suggest that, in terms ofsense 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 complaintsfrom the house buyers. Interestingly, most of the senior construction practitioners proposed severalunique and unaware practical ways for defect identification, such as by using torch light, water, andother simple testing methods. This research contributes in that it embarks on application-basedsoftware as knowledge management and distribution effort, which is anchored on Android by GoogleIncorporation.