Building defects in Danish construction: project characteristics influencing the occurrence of defects at handover

Defects in construction have gained much attention from both the public and academia. Danish construction is no exception and a number of political initiatives have been established to address the unsatisfying amounts of defects. One of the political initiatives, benchmarking, collects and provides information from building projects on defects at handover to clients and on a number of project characteristics. This article utilizes the substantial amount of data from the benchmarking initiative to examine which project characteristics differentiate building projects with none or few cosmetic defects from those with many and/or serious defects. The article reviews the results from studying two quantitative data sets: (I) benchmarking data from 329 building projects and 621 contracts and (II) questionnaire data from an electronic survey comprising 130 contractors. This study provides in-depth knowledge about correlations between project characteristics and the extent of defects measured at handover. Results show statistically significant differences between building projects characterized by no or few defects compared with building projects with many and/ or serious defects. Determining characteristics are the planning of budgetary conditions, time schedules and early, continuous quality control. Furthermore, this study also indicates collaboration between stakeholders plus skills and safety initiatives as having a positive influence on the performance measured as defects at handover.