Safety has long been regarded as one of the most important functional requirements of buildings. However, building safety in Hong Kong has long been jeopardised by the proliferation of unauthorised building works (UBWs), which are essentially works constructed without any prior approval or consent of the government. Due to the acute problem of housing supply–demand imbalance, the numbers of illegal subdivided units (ISUs) in the city have been increasing since the early 2010s, frequently resulting in injuries and deaths amongst the residents. It is therefore a matter of urgency for the government to tackle the problem. Speculative property owners construct ISUs in their premises for economic gain so the government needs to enforce rules against the construction of ISUs. Building inspection should be carried out to uncover cases of illegal construction for subsequent enforcement actions. In this article, a game-theoretic model for the strategic control of existing buildings in Hong Kong is developed to illustrate that, when the level of punishment against ISU increases, the less frequent ISU inspections needed by the government will be, and concurrently, the chances of ISU construction by property owners will decrease. The model offers valuable insights into why Hong Kong’s building control system fails to solve the problem of ISU proliferation in the city.
Eco-certification schemes are usually launched with various incentives provided by local governments to facilitate green building development and building energy retrofits. A number of barriers to building energy retrofitting have been identified in previous literature, while the barriers to the eco-certification of existing buildings are under-researched. Drawing on a set of building data retrievable from the BEAM Society and other sources, we carried out an analysis and found the building energy retrofitting, as well as the certification process, were unwelcomed in multi-owned residential buildings. The identified shortfall is put forward from the perspectives of transaction cost theory and agency theory. The findings reveal that high transaction costs incurred during negotiations and coordination among a large number of co-owners within a typical apartment building can outweigh the benefits of retrofitting and eco-certification. Besides, the remuneration structure of third-party property management agents discourages agents from facilitating co-owners to initiate retrofitting. This study provides significant implications for policymakers to understand the concerns of building owners and managers over the decisions and the processes of both the building energy retrofits and eco-certification. The problems and barriers unveiled in this study will facilitate the refining of current energy efficiency policies and related incentives designs.
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