Factors influencing Building Information Modelling adoption for residential property development

Abstract

Appalled by the low uptake of building information modelling (BIM) in the housing sector, this study investigates the factors influencing the adoption of BIM for residential property development in Nigeria, an emerging market. The primary data utilized were elicited with the aid of a questionnaire served on the officials of real estate development firms in Nigeria. The obtained data were analyzed using statistical tools such as mean ranking, frequency distribution and principal component analysis (PCA). Based on mean ranking analysis, high cost of implementing BIM (MS = 4.38), cost of hardware installation (MS = 4.24) were found as the most influential inhibiting factors. On further analysis, the results of the PCA revealed that the factors influencing BIM adoption can be grouped into operating environment and regulatory factors, cost of acquisition/usage factors, firm management factors, usage capability factors and client demand factors, with variances of 26.834%, 18.792%, 13.439%, 6.275% and 2.909% respectively. The study concluded that issues surrounding operating environment constraints and cost of acquisition and deployment significantly underpin the uptake of BIM technology in emerging economies like Nigeria. Hence, it is imperative that real estate development organizations embrace industry collaboration and efforts made to reduce BIM acquisition and deployment cost.