Housing quality requirements in Chile: a users’ survey

Abstract

Quality management systems are focused on satisfying client’s requirements. For this reason, it is very important to obtain an adequate knowledge of them. The Center of Excellence for Construction Quality at the Catholic University of Chile, applied a survey recently for identifying the main quality requirements of housing users and establishing an importance ranking of them. The survey was applied to 164 inhabitants of several areas of the city of Santiago and classified at different socioeconomic levels. This paper presents and discusses the main results of the survey. The information reported here is very important for the building industry because in this way, real estate and construction companies can have better information available about what is more important for houses users and use it to improve the quality and value of their products with a clear focus on clients requirements. These results can also be useful for the construction industries of other developing countries. One of the main conclusions of this study is that survey’s results show that user’s quality requirements are relatively independent from the housing’s type and the socioeconomic stratum of respondents.