House buyer knowledge on building defect and their rights / Nursyahadatul Aisyah Abd Karim

Having a home as a shelter is a basic facility that provides a family with comfort and a safe place to live. In addition, regardless of the building’s design the purpose of the building itself is to provide occupants with functional space to conduct activities, provide security and comfort. However, living in such defective house can cause injury to building occupant. New building usually come with warranty which allowed the owner to make any claim against the developer. Unfortunately, today’s reality reveals that there are many homeowner are still lack of knowledge to manage their house even though clauses have been given in construction contract. The discovery of latent defects some day or later after the contract has ended which no longer under contractor’s liability may present injustice to home buyers. The time restriction is quite comfortable protection for house buyer but not in the case of latent defects. To rub salt into the wound, the widespread deceit among contractors in expressing the provision obligation under the contract left buyer’s conscious behind. To turn blind eye, house owner will be given very limited scope of complaint form which directly impact on the inspection carried out. Therefore it is necessary for house owner to have the role and knowledge as house buyer to own a house. This topic is chosen to study the awareness and house buyer’s knowledge on defects and their participation to claim against the contractor. This research uses several methods to derive a comprehensive study, by collecting data from internet sources, distributing questionnaire to a potential home buyers in Malaysia among general public. Overall, this paper will emphasize on the direction of research in terms of research questions and objective, gaps of research, research methodology and literature review to contribute to the body of knowledge in this field.