Something rotten in the state…
IN LATE 1994, AN UGLY NEW PROBLEM surfaced in New Zealand buildings – far too many were found to be quickly rotting. Within a few years, the problem mushroomed into a massive, full-fledged disaster generating an entirely new industry known as weathertightness remediation.
As the new industry evolved, a new perspective – extreme risk aversion – appeared. Not only were many thousands of buildings rotting but the fix was becoming ruinously expensive. Risk aversion enabled the capture of the industry by what can be summarised as the full re-clad/re-roof solution. Only a small minority advocated for effective and less-expensive, targeted repairs. To the majority, as building surveyor Mark Hazlehurst put it, targeted repairs were “… about as welcome as a fart in a spacesuit”.1
More than a quarter of a century later, we are still building leaky buildings.2 Total re-clad/re-roof remains the default repair method. And, while many weathertight failures clearly demand full re-cladding, some are questioning whether or not this one-size-fits-all solution is sensible. Is it even possible?
The 2009 PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) report Weathertightness – Estimating the Cost estimated the average cost for a full re-clad of a residence at $300,000.3 In 2015, Data on Residential Weathertightness Failures estimated that more than 174,000 New Zealand dwellings built between 1990 and 2014 would be “very likely to leak”.
The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) has never published this report. This may have something to do with the maths: applying the PwC 2009 figures (not adjusted for inflation) to the 2015 data tells us that re-cladding all these homes will cost $52.3 billion. This
