Causes of construction delay for housing projects in Malaysia

Abstract

Every organization that is involved with the construction industry undoubtedly has delayed progress at some phase in their project or development. Delay in construction project become a common situation that contractor, client, or consultant might face. Construction delay can bring bad impacts to the organization itself or the overall development of a nation. From the previous studies, there are many researchers mentioned about the causes and impacts of the construction in Malaysia. However, little effort has been made to reduce this phenomenon in housing projects. Therefore, this research is to determine the delay factors involved in housing projects and rank the delay factors and delay impacts for housing projects. The qualitative method has been used to collect the data by distributing the questionnaire survey which contains 3 sections, the first section was demographic questions, the second section was the delay factors and lastly the delay impacts. The questionnaire was distributed to 30 experts to validate the delay factors that was obtained from the literature reviews and the second stage was targeted to 151 respondents who are involved in the construction industry. Total of sixty-three delay factors were identified with a total of eight groups meanwhile, the impact of delays in construction determined were twelve. Relative Importance Index (RII) method was used to rank those delay factors and impacts. The outcome of the study highlighted the most significant delay factors which are;(1) weather condition; (2) shortage in skilled laborers due to remoteness of site location; (3) progress payment delay by client; (4) award project to lowest bid price and (5) political interference.