No government in the world had gone forward to undertake remediation of existing stock at such a large scale.
And these are active buildings, that are occupied.
The role of the Clerk of Works is essentially one of an independent umpire around safety and quality.
It's the old case of a stitch in time, saves nine.
And then you take that fixing off, it comes back here, and that one comes off.
If we find something that is not as it should be then we create an observation.
That gets distributed with the builder and our internal teams.
And we can track that, and the builder can track that to make sure that the observation is being closed out.
When we first commenced I'd say you'd be getting somewhere between 60-80 observations a month, around a month.
So you're looking at 15-20 a week.
Now we're lucky to get, I would say, one a week. One to two a week.
So obviously that's come a long way over the past three to four years we've been working.
Obviously familiarising ourselves with the products that are being installed.
The methodologies, and also the safety standards as well. Continuing to improve our safety standards.
We've assessed the benefits consistently and we've had over seven thousand observations of quality and safety.
If we monetise those observations, in terms of issues prevented, we believe there is a 700 percent or seven-times return on the investment, which is enormous.
Personally, as a business it has been fantastic to have a free upskilling, for lack of a better term, through the Cladding Safety Victoria and Clerk of Work process, and I can already see on our other projects that it has added great value.
The other thing that it has really done for us as a business is start conversations around details, around installation methods, and things like that, and that's been really positive in our office as well.
The biggest cost for builders post construction is water ingress into apartments, and having to go back and find solutions for that when it is no longer a construction site.
A lot of that comes through the facade, or waterproofing and one thing that the clerk of works has been really proactive and adding value and upskilling, not only our site foreman but our subcontractors, has been in those two areas.
Which I would say is the biggest cost to our business, once the project is completed.
What we've seen with buildings in our program is that buildings even in the five to seven year age have had rapid decline in quality. And that's because key steps weren't taken to ensure that they were built to a level of quality.
But I think there's a great level of good business sense for the clerk of works to be reintroduced on a broader scale, right across domestic building, as well as the more sophisticated Class 2 high-rise, or commercial buildings.
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