A study of tenants' maintenance awareness, responsibility and satisfaction in institutional housing in Nigeria

Abstract

The housing problem in Nigeria is both quantitative and qualitative. The qualitative aspect, which has to do with the maintenance of the existing stock, has assumed greater significance because of the need to preserve the existing stock and bring it to acceptable standards of living. Tenants in institutional housing are major stakeholders who directly bear the brunt of the disrepair of the houses. Hence they have a role to play to optimise the maintenance of their houses within the very limited resources available to the maintenance departments. The study was carried out to evaluate the maintenance awareness and respon-sibilities of tenants and quantitatively analyse their satisfaction with the state of mainte-nance of their houses. The results showed that the tenants had a high level of maintenance awareness and responsibility but their satisfaction with the maintenance of their houses was just average.

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International Journal of Strategic Property Management
ISSN 1648-715X print / ISSN 1648-9179 online © 2006 Vilnius Gediminas Technical University
http://www.ijspm.vgtu.lt
International Journal of Strategic Property Management (2006) 10, 217231
A STUDY OF TENANTS MAINTENANCE AWARENESS,
RESPONSIBILITY AND SATISFACTION IN
INSTITUTIONAL HOUSING IN NIGERIA
Adebayo A. OLADAPO
Department of Quantity Surveying, Faculty of Environmental Design
and Management, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria
E-mail: adeladapo@yahoo.com
Received 12 September 2005; accepted 22 May 2006
ABSTRACT. The housing problem in Nigeria is both quantitative and qualitative. The
qualitative aspect, which has to do with the maintenance of the existing stock, has assumed
greater significance because of the need to preserve the existing stock and bring it to acceptable
standards of living. Tenants in institutional housing are major stakeholders who directly bear
the brunt of the disrepair of the houses. Hence they have a role to play to optimise the
maintenance of their houses within the very limited resources available to the maintenance
departments. The study was carried out to evaluate the maintenance awareness and respon-
sibilities of tenants and quantitatively analyse their satisfaction with the state of mainte-
nance of their houses. The results showed that the tenants had a high level of maintenance
awareness and responsibility but their satisfaction with the maintenance of their houses was
just average.
KEYWORDS: Maintenance; Institutional housing; Tenant issues; Nigeria
1. INTRODUCTION
Housing is universally acknowledged as the
second most essential human need after food
and is a major economic asset in every nation.
This fact is underscored by a statement in the
foreword to Fosters (2000) report that Good
quality housing provides the foundations for
stable communities and social inclusion. So
and Leung (2004) have also established a posi-
tive correlation between the quality of life and
the comfort, convenience and visual appeal of
houses.
A United Nations report in 1976 described
the problem of housing in Africa as far from
being only technical and economic, but also a
problem of social development in its widest
sense, encompassing legal, educational and
community-building aspects and directed at
real human and social improvement (van Wyk
and van Wyk, 2001). Indeed, van Wyk and van
Wyk (2001) made the important point that it
is apparent that the problems of housing, ur-
ban development and economic development
are closely interrelated. They added that hous-
ing certainly has a large potential to contrib-
ute towards providing people with the oppor-
tunity to live full human lives, and hence con-
tributes positively towards all aspects of de-
velopment  psychological, social, economic,
cultural and institutional, in the individual,
community and societal contexts.

& A. A. Oladapo
Against this background, it is not surpris-
ing that since the colonial era (before independ-
ence in 1960) successive governments in Ni-
geria have embarked on programmes to pro-
vide housing for public servants. These pro-
grammes recorded very little success, with
some achieving as little as 15 % of their set
targets. Nigeria therefore accumulated a hous-
ing deficit estimated at five million new units
by the year 2000, the target year of the UNs
Shelter for All agenda. In addition, there was
a backlog of maintenance required to bring
existing units to acceptable standards of liv-
ing, equivalent to the cost of three million new
units (Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1991).
It is clear from the foregoing that the
housing problem in Nigeria is both quantitative
and qualitative. In fact, Ozdemir (2002)
regards the quality problem as the main
problem in housing and advocates that housing
policies should focus not only on the production
of new housing units but also on improving
the standards of the existing stock to meet
current and changing standards. The
qualitative aspect of the housing problem is
the problem of maintenance. The problem of
maintenance arises because buildings
inevitably deteriorate with time due to effect
of various causes.
As stated earlier, research has established
a positive correlation between the quality of
life of tenants and the comfort, convenience
and visual appeal of houses. These attributes
of a house, no doubt, are a function of its state
of maintenance. This is because the essence of
maintenance, by definition, is to keep a build-
ing in a condition appropriate to its use (El-
Haram and Horner, 2002). The implication of
this reality is that tenants have a very high
stake in the maintenance of their houses,
whether they are responsible for the mainte-
nance or not. In fact, Bitner et al. (1997) be-
lieve that in the provision of services (like hous-
ing maintenance and repairs), the customers
(including tenants) have vital roles to play in
creating service outcomes to ultimately deter-
mine the value and level of satisfaction they
receive. It is for this reason that this study
aimed at assessing tenants maintenance
awareness and responsibility as well as their
level of satisfaction with the maintenance of
their houses.
To achieve the stated aim of this study, the
following research questions were raised:
 What is tenants level of understanding
of the concept of maintenance?
 In what ways do tenants contribute to the
state of maintenance of their houses?
 How do tenants prioritise competing
maintenance demands?
 What is the tenants level of satisfaction
with the state of maintenance of their
houses?
The following hypotheses were formulated
and tested to seek answers to some of the re-
search questions:
1. Null hypothesis (H0): There is no agree-
ment among tenants in their maintenance pri-
ority preferences.
Alternative hypothesis (H1): There is agree-
ment among tenants in their maintenance pri-
ority preferences.
2. Null hypothesis (H0): There is no signifi-
cant difference between the maintenance pri-
ority preferences of tenants and the mainte-
nance departments.
Alternative hypothesis (H1): There is sig-
nificant difference in the maintenance prior-
ity preferences of tenants and the maintenance
departments.
3. Null hypothesis (H0): There is no agree-
ment among tenants in their satisfaction rat-
ing of the level of maintenance of their houses.
Alternative hypothesis (H1): There is agree-
ment among tenants in their satisfaction rat-
ing of the level of maintenance of their houses.
4. Null hypothesis (H0): There is no signifi-
cant correlation between users perception of
the level of maintenance of a particular build-
ing and the prevalent level of user satisfac-
tion.
Alternative hypothesis (H1): There is sig-
nificant correlation between users perception
of the level of maintenance of a particular

'
A Study of Tenants Maintenance Awareness, Responsibilyty and Satisfaction in ...
building and the prevalent level of user satis-
faction.
2. INSTITUTIONAL HOUSING
IN NIGERIA
As a deliberate strategy, Nigerias housing
policies have over the years encouraged em-
ployers of labour in both the public and pri-
vate sectors to provide housing for their work-
ers. Thus in addition to barracks accommoda-
tion for the armed forces, the police and other
paramilitary organisations, institutions like the
Nigerian Railways, educational institutions
(especially the universities) and even multina-
tional oil companies, etc. have developed large
housing estates for their employees.
Most of Nigerias universities operate the
residential system by which housing accommo-
dation is provided for both students and staff
on campus. Over the years these institutions
have developed large housing estates, which are
among the largest estates in the country in
terms of land areas and number of units. Un-
like most others (in both the public and private
sectors), the university housing estates have
well-organised technical departments responsi-
ble for the maintenance of the houses. For this
reason and the fact that the university housing
maintenance organisations are more accessible
to researchers than most others, three large
university housing estates having a total of 1357
units were selected for this study.
3. TENANTS ROLES AND
SATISFACTION IN HOUSING
MAINTENANCE
Building users generate maintenance in two
major ways. First, their normal use of build-
ings results in natural wear and tear as envis-
aged in the building design and specification.
Second, their abuse of buildings, especially
through vandalism, results in wilful damage
to a building. Another way is perhaps what
Olubodun (1996) called passive vandalism,
which is wilful neglect of affordable mainte-
nance responsibility by a user. This no doubt
leads to further deterioration of the building
condition and generates more maintenance. In
their study of local authority housing in Scot-
land, El-Haram and Horner (2002) identified
tenant factors like high expectation of tenants,
improper use of the property and delay in re-
porting failures as very significant contribu-
tors to housing maintenance costs.
The primary initiators of maintenance ac-
tion are the building owner and/or tenants, al-
though such other interested parties as build-
ing inspectors, insurance companies, employ-
ees and their trade unions and concerned mem-
bers of the public directly or indirectly exert
some influence on the amount of maintenance
work undertaken. A building owner normally
seeks to preserve the condition of his property
by the insertion of appropriate clauses in the
lease/tenancy agreement to demarcate owner/
user responsibilities for maintenance. In some
countries such demarcations are laid down by
statute. For example, in the UK, section 11 of
the Landlord and Tenant Act of 1985 provides
that in any lease for less than seven years,
the landlord shall be responsible for repairing
the structure and exterior of the building as
well as the mechanical and electrical installa-
tions (Lee, 1995).
Whatever the owner/user demarcation of
maintenance responsibility, the user has a pri-
mary responsibility to notify defects to the ap-
propriate quarters for remedial action. Seeley
(1987) identified six commonly used means of
notification by users as follows:
 Telephone call from tenant;
 Return of pre-paid complaint card by ten-
ant;
 Letter from tenant;
 Officer of housing authority finding de-
fects;
 Tenant notifying defect in person at a de-
pot or housing office;
 Tenant notifying complaint to officer of
housing authority on site.
Kangwa and Olubodun (2003b) are of the
view that owner-occupiers must have an un-

 A. A. Oladapo
derstanding or knowledge of the severity of the
defects observed or anticipated in their dwell-
ing structures. This view, no doubt, should also
apply to tenants. Unfortunately, however, lack
of awareness among homeowners and tenants
remains a barrier to prompt notification of de-
fects as most home owners/tenants face diffi-
culties in recognising the symptoms of even
the most basic forms of building decay
(Kangwa and Olubodun, 2003a). The report-
ing delay time is the time which elapses be-
tween the detection/observance of a defect and
report to the maintenance department by the
user. This depends mainly on the inconven-
ience which the defects cause the user and is
not a measure of the seriousness of the defect
(Lee, 1995). Lack of maintenance awareness
prevents tenants from identifying in time the
relative value and urgency of a repair
(Richardson, 1991) and also manifests in the
wrong notion that housing deterioration has
no impact on tenants standard of living
(Kangwa and Olubodun, 2003a).
Users also have a role in evaluating the ef-
fectiveness of maintenance management sys-
tems to provide feedback to maintenance man-
agers. This is usually done in post-occupancy
evaluations which measure user satisfaction
as an indicator of a buildings utility. This sys-
tem very often excludes building users from
the early design decision-making process.
McGeorge and Betts (1990) have expressed the
view that, in addition to post-occupancy evalu-
ation, a pre-occupancy stakeholder analysis
could enhance the utility of a building to the
user particularly in the area of maintenance
planning. There is no doubt that the end user
must inevitably bear some of the consequences
of errors in planning. The cost of such errors
to the user could be in terms of higher main-
tenance costs or health hazards.
Two categories of stakeholders, namely
owners and users are identified in the normal
convention for stakeholder analysis. In the con-
text of housing there could be some overlap
between these two categories. Hence McGeorge
and Betts (1990) have cautioned that making
a distinction between them could be counter-
productive. There is no doubt, however, that
stakeholders in housing are likely to have con-
flicting objectives, which a pre-occupancy
evaluation can help to balance.
Tenant Satisfaction in Housing
Housing satisfaction refers to the degree of
contentment experienced by an individual or
family with regard to the current housing situ-
ation (McCray and Day, cited in Djebarni and
Al-Abed, 2000). It is an index of the level of
contentment with current housing conditions,
and refers to an entire continuum of satisfac-
tion from very dissatisfied to very satisfied
rather than just a state of being satisfied
(Morris, cited in Djebarni and Al-Abed, 2000).
Housing is more than shelter and the hab-
itability of a house depends not only on the
physical characteristics of the dwelling but also
on the social, cultural and behavioural charac-
teristics of the users. This is why Lu (1999)
has expressed the view that housing satisfac-
tion is not only an important component of in-
dividuals quality of life but also determines
the way they respond to the residential envi-
ronment. A dwelling that is adequate from the
physical or design point of view may not nec-
essarily be adequate or satisfactory from the
users point of view (Onibokun, cited in
Oladapo, 2005). On this basis, according to
Oladapo (2005), he advocated a systems ap-
proach to the concept of user satisfaction in-
volving four interacting subsystems-the tenant
subsystem, the dwelling subsystem, the envi-
ronment subsystem and the management sub-
system (Figure 1).
The model in Figure 1 depicts a system of
tenant-dwelling unit-environment-manage-
ment interaction which produces a housing
situation which the tenant component judges
as adequate and satisfactory according to his
housing needs and expectations. Djebarni and
Al-Abed (2000) have combined the adequacy
and satisfaction requirements into a housing
effectiveness model.


A Study of Tenants Maintenance Awareness, Responsibilyty and Satisfaction in ...
Figure 1. Onibokuns systems approach to user satisfaction
Source: Oladapo (2005)
At the heart of the user satisfaction model
in Figure 1 is the tenant (the fourth subsys-
tem) who is the recipient of all the feedback
from the other subsystems and is therefore the
central focus of the model on which satisfac-
tion in housing management should be based.
In this model, the housing unit is a part of an
environment and must of necessity interact
with the environment subsystem which has
influence, negative or positive, on the inhabit-
ants living conditions and their satisfaction
with a particular housing unit within an envi-
ronment. There is also the management sub-
system which comprises the whole institutional
framework under which public housing is ad-
ministered.
As stated earlier, housing is more than shel-
ter. Hence, according to Ukoha and Beamish
(1997), simply providing housing units does
not measure the success of housing programs
in either developed or developing countries.
The suitability of the living environment to the
needs of the residents is essential for housing
programmes to be judged successful. In their
research on public housing in Abuja, Nigeria,
Ukoha and Beamish found that the manage-
ment dimension (including maintenance) was
the primary source of dissatisfaction among
tenants. Measuring housing satisfaction is im-
portant because, according to Lu (1999), an
understanding of the factors that make a ten-
ant satisfied or dissatisfied can play a critical
role in formulating successful housing policies.
From the literature, the indicators of ten-
ant satisfaction with housing maintenance are
summarised as:
§Procedure for requesting repairs (Koebel
and Etuk, 1998);
§The courtesy of the maintenance staff
(Koebel and Etuk, 1998);
§Speed of response and execution by main-
tenance staff (Koebel and Etuk, 1998;
Rosenbaum et al., 1998; National Hous-
ing Federation, 2001);

A. A. Oladapo
§Level of mess and nuisance caused by
maintenance staff (National Housing Fed-
eration, 2001);
§The quality of work done by maintenance
staff (National Housing Federation, 2001);
§Overall maintenance of the houses (Na-
tional Housing Federation, 2001).
Examining a maintenance management
system using these indicators permits a com-
prehensive survey of the satisfaction of ten-
ants with the system. However, in the light of
the criticisms of tenant satisfaction surveys in
housing by several authors, including Satsangi
and Kearns (1992) and Koebel and Etuk (1998),
a fundamental problem arises as to whether
tenant satisfaction surveys can be used to
judge maintenance management performance.
Indeed, Satsangi and Kearns (1992) argued
that conventional tenant satisfaction surveys
which set out to measure tenants satisfaction
with service provided often end up measuring
factors independent of the providers perform-
ance. They further argued that the use of the
satisfaction score as an indicator of the effec-
tiveness of the service provider, without tak-
ing into account the likely impact of other fac-
tors upon the rating, is highly misleading. To
overcome some of these limitations, they ad-
vocated more reliable measures of tenants sat-
isfaction which should take into account that
(a) not all consumers are likely to have perfect
information; (b) degrees of satisfaction vary for
different individuals in different circumstances;
(c) most housing services have no absolute cri-
teria of judgment; (d) judgment of service qual-
ity (and degree of satisfaction) are subjective,
and dependent upon culture, social identity,
etc.
In spite of these criticisms, however, the fact
still remains that no better alternative has
been found to tenant satisfaction surveys. Even
its most ardent critics recognise some of its
merits and can only suggest modifications as
demonstrated by Satsangi and Kearns (1992).
In fact, Ngo (1990) has stated that the degree
of user satisfaction is one of the indicators of
the level to which a building has been main-
tained. Several other researchers, including
Amole (1989), Walters (1999) and Foster (2000)
have supported this view. This makes tenants
satisfaction a good measure of housing main-
tenance performance.
4. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
A questionnaire survey of three university
housing estates was carried out between Feb-
ruary and June 2004. The estates, which are
among the largest in institutional housing in
Nigeria, had a combined total of 1357 units.
Of the 1310 units occupied at the time of the
survey, every other house in an estate was cho-
sen. This represented a simple random sam-
ple size of 5 %. The questions were framed to
test the tenants appreciation of the need for
maintenance, and elicit responses on their re-
sponsibilities and priority preferences, as well
as their satisfaction with the maintenance
state of their houses. Borrowing from the sug-
gestions of Varady and Carrozza (2000) for a
proper measure of tenant satisfaction, the
questionnaire covered different components of
satisfaction with housing maintenance and elic-
ited both quantitative and qualitative informa-
tion from the respondents.
The questionnaires were personally admin-
istered by trained research assistants to the
head of each selected household. Most of the
questions used Likert type scales to elicit re-
spondents perceptions. To minimise the prob-
lem of leniency, central tendency and the halo
effect associated with such scales, the survey
instrument adopted a seven-point scale (after
Walker, 1994). Thus the responses ranged from
strongly disagree = 1 to strongly agree = 7.
The significant agreement or otherwise with
the notion being tested was determined by
adopting the mid-point value of the index (that
is 4 = unsure) as the hypothesized mean
(Coakes and Steed, 2001). This implies that
any result significantly different from this un-
committed or unsure value was assumed to be
either positive or negative to the notion being
tested (Pullin and Haidar, 2003). To test the

!
A Study of Tenants Maintenance Awareness, Responsibilyty and Satisfaction in ...
reliability of the questionnaires used in this
study, the Cronbachs I values were calcu-
lated (using the SPSS package) for the 7 
point scale and found to be very high between
0.80 and 0.89.
The data were analysed with the SPSS soft-
ware using the percentile method, Kendalls
coefficient of concordance, the Mann-Whitney
test and severity index analysis. The formula
for the severity index is given as follows by
Elhag and Boussabaine (1999):
n
fw
IS
ni
iii %100
.. 1
×






=
∑
=
=,
where: S.I. is the severity index; fi is the fre-
quency of response; wi is the weight for each
rating (i.e. rating in scale/number of points in
a scale), and n is the total number of responses.
The value (fi x 100)/n is the valid percentage
as computed by SPSS.
5. ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION
OF RESULTS
Of the 655 questionnaires distributed, 406
were returned. This represents a response
rate of 61.98 %, which is very good, according
to Ellhag and Boussabaine (1999) and Idrus
and Newman (2002) who have expressed the
view that a response rate of 30 % is good
enough in construction. In addition, the 406
responses obtained gave the sample a confi-
dence interval better than ± 5.0 (De Vaus,
1996). The tenants mean length of stay in the
houses was 8.44 years, which indicated that
on the average the tenants had lived in the
house long enough to provide detailed infor-
mation on the maintenance history of their
houses. The results are presented on tenants
maintenance awareness, responsibility, prior-
ity preferences, performance rating of and
satisfaction with the state of maintenance of
their houses.
5.1. Tenants Maintenance Awareness
and Responsibility
As major stakeholders in housing mainte-
nance, tenants are expected to understand
and appreciate the need for maintenance. In
Table 1, only 8 respondents (2 %) had no idea
why maintenance was necessary, while most
of them (77.8 %) believed that maintenance
was necessary to keep the house safe for habi-
tation. This high level of maintenance aware-
ness may encourage tenants to respond
promptly to the detection of defects in their
houses. In fact, Table 2 shows that more than
a quarter (28.6 %) report faults promptly
while about half (44.5 %) even fix minor faults
themselves.
The high level of maintenance awareness
and responsibility demonstrated by the tenants
is reflected in the fact that 50.7 % of the re-
spondents believed that it was their duty to
use the houses with care while only a negligi-
ble number 1.7 % felt it was none of their busi-
ness to contribute. Some tenants were even
prepared to do some maintenance work them-
selves (44.6 %) or provide materials when the
maintenance department did not have them
(30.8 %).
Table 1. Tenants awareness of the rationale for maintenance
Reason Frequency Percent
To keep the house safe for habitation 316 77.8
To preserve the house from decay 242 59.6
To keep the house beautiful and presentable 257 63.3
To retain the value of the house 217 53.4
Others 19 4.7
I don’t know 8 2.0

" A. A. Oladapo
5.2. Tenants Priority Preferences
All over the world, the dwindling resources
available for maintenance (including Housing
maintenance) in the face of ever-increasing
maintenance demands requires that mainte-
nance needs be prioritised to achieve the best
value for money (Ramamurthy, 1990; Berger
et al., 1991; Shen et al., 1998; Vijverberg, 2000).
Traditionally, maintenance prioritisation has
been done by maintenance departments with-
out considering the views of tenants. Yip (2001)
has argued in favour of tenant participation
in this vital exercise to enhance tenants sat-
isfaction with maintenance systems. Towing
this line, tenants were asked in this study to
rank 16 common building defects in order of
priority. In Table 3, the significance value of
Kendalls coefficient of concordance is 0.000
(i.e. < 0.05), indicating that there was agree-
ment (at 5 % significance level) among the ten-
ants in their priority preferences. These re-
sults enable us to reject the null hypothesis
that There is no agreement among tenants
in their maintenance priority preferences and
accept the alternative that There is agreement
among tenants in their maintenance priority
preferences.
Tenants priority preferences were then
compared with those of the maintenance de-
partments in Table 4 to see if there was any
Table 2. Tenants response to the detection of defects in dwellings
Response Frequency Percent
I report faults immediately no matter how small 114 28.6
I take my time to report minor faults 3 7.5
I fix minor faults myself 177 44.5
I only report life/health-threatening faults 57 14.3
I never report faults 17 4.3
Other 3 0.08
Table 3. Kendalls coefficient of concordance test of agreement among tenants in priority ranking
No of Cases W ÷2 df Significance
341 0.318 1628.138 15 0.000
harmony between the two. It is not surpris-
ing that both the tenants and the mainte-
nance staff ranked roof structure number 1,
as it is apparent to both groups that a col-
lapsed roof exposes other parts of the build-
ing to the elements and can endanger both
lives and property. On the other hand, both
wall tile failure and floor tile failure, which
pose no such dangers as for collapsed roof
structures, were ranked number 16 (last) by
the tenants and the maintenance departments
respectively. These rankings by the tenants
also show that they have a high level of
awareness and understanding of the ration-
ale for maintenance.
To determine whether the rankings of ten-
ants and the maintenance departments dif-
fer significantly, the nonparametric method of
the Mann-Whitney test is applied in Table 5.
It is used to test the null hypothesis that two
populations have identical distribution func-
tions against the alternative hypothesis that
the two distribution functions differ only with
respect to location (median), if at all. The re-
sults in Table 5 indicate that only in three
defects (defect in roof structure, floor tile fail-
ure and damaged taps/stop valves) out of the
sixteen defects are there significant differ-
ences between the priority preferences of ten-
ants and the maintenance departments
(p < 0.05 at the 5 % significance level). There-

#
A Study of Tenants Maintenance Awareness, Responsibilyty and Satisfaction in ...
Tab le 4 . Comparison of priority preferences of tenants and technical staff
Tenants Maintenance departments
Defect Variable label Mean score Priority rank Mean
score Priority rank
Defects in roof structure DEFRFSTRUCT 3.38 1 1.43 1
Broken louvers/panes BRKLV/PNS 9.28 12 8.71 9
Wall cracks WCRCKS 8.66 9 8.10 7
Damaged internal door DMGINDR 9.73 13 9.38 11
Blocked drain BLKDRN 7.68 7 7.10 6
Floor tile failure FLTLFLR 12.45 14 14.00 16
Burst pipes/sanitary appliances BSTPP/SANAPP 5.77 3 6.76 5
Electrical faults ELECTFLTS 5.25 2 4.90 2
Damaged roofing sheets DMGRFSHTS 6.47 4 5.19 3
Wall tile failure WLTLFLR 12.81 16 12.52 14
Damaged external door DMGEXDR 6.80 5 5.90 4
Damaged painting/decoration DMGPTG/DECOR 12.77 15 13.86 15
Damaged ceiling DMGCLG 8.70 10 9.67 13
Damaged door locks DMGDRLKS 8.37 8 8.57 8
Damaged door and window
frames DMGDR/WNFRM 9.25 11 9.29 10
Damaged taps/stop valves DMGTPS/SVS 7.59 6 9.43 12
fore we accept the null hypothesis that There
is no significant difference between the main-
tenance priority preferences of tenants and
the maintenance department and reject the
alternative hypothesis that There are signifi-
cant differences between the maintenance pri-
ority preferences of tenants and the mainte-
nance department.
The fact that there is agreement among the
tenants in their priority ranking of building
defects, and there is no significant difference
between the tenants and the maintenance de-
partments in their priority preferences augurs
well for the prioritisation of maintenance works
in two ways. First, agreement between tenants
on the one hand and the maintenance depart-
ments on the other ensures that the two sides
do not have conflicting expectations. Secondly,
agreement among tenants themselves makes
it possible for maintenance management to fix
priorities acceptable to the generality of the
tenants.
5.3. Maintenance Performance Rating
and Tenants Satisfaction
As stated earlier, the level of tenants satis-
faction is an index of maintenance perform-
ance. For tenants satisfaction to be used as a
measure of housing maintenance performance,
it is important that tenants be in agreement
in their assessments of the various attributes
of maintenance satisfaction. Also, for tenant
ratings of their satisfaction to be objective it
must be based on the actual state of mainte-
nance of their dwellings and not on extrane-
ous factors. To examine these issues, two null
hypotheses were postulated as follows:
 There is no agreement among tenants in
their satisfaction rating of housing main-
tenance management.
 There is no significant correlation be-
tween users perception of the level of
maintenance of a particular building and
the prevalent level of user satisfaction.

$ A. A. Oladapo
Table 5. Mann-Whitney test for differences between priority preferences of tenants and technical staff a
Building defects Defect 9 Defect 10 Defect 11 Defect 12 Defect 13 Defect 14 Defect 15 Defect 16
Mann-
Whitney U 2606.500 3084.000 2987.500 2955.000 2949.500 3405.000 3358.000 2310.500
Wilcoxon W 2816.500 3294.000 3197.500 61266.000 61260.500 3615.000 3568.000 60621.500
Z -1.780 -0.731 -0.935 -1.023 -1.018 -0.011 -0.115 -2.431
Asymp. Sig.
(2-tailed) 0.075 0.465 0.350 0.306 0.309 0.991 0.908 0.015
a Grouping Variable: Tenant/Maintenance department
Building defects Defect 1 Defect 2 Defect 3 Defect 4 Defect 5 Defect 6 Defect 7 Defect 8
Mann-
Whitney U 2540.000 3239.500 3207.000 3053.000 3255.500 2281.000 2599.000 3245.500
Wilcoxon W 2750.000 3449.500 3417.000 3263.000 3465.500 60592.000 60910.000 3455.500
Z -2.135 -0.377 -0.449 -0.790 -0.342 -2.516 -1.801 -0.365
Asymp. Sig.
(2-tailed) 0.033 0.706 0.654 0.430 0.733 0.012 0.072 0.715
LEGEND
Defect 1 Defects in roof structure Defect 7 Burst pipes/broken sanitary appliances Defect 13 Damaged ceiling
Defect 2 Broken louvers/panes Defect 8 Electrical faults Defect 14 Damaged door locks
Defect 3 Wall cracks Defect 9 Damaged roofing sheets Defect 15 Damaged door/window frames
Defect 4 Damaged internal doors Defect 10 Wall tile failure Defect 16 Damaged taps/stop valves
Defect 5 Blocked drain Defect 11 Damaged external doors
Defect 6 Floor tile failure Defect 12 Damaged painting/decorating

%
A Study of Tenants Maintenance Awareness, Responsibilyty and Satisfaction in ...
The first hypothesis is tested using Kendalls
test of concordance (Table 6). For the signifi-
cance level p < 0.05, we reject the null hypoth-
esis that There is no agreement among ten-
ants in their satisfaction rating of housing
maintenance management and accept the al-
ternative hypothesis that there is agreement
among tenants in their satisfaction rating of
housing maintenance management.
With the results above we proceed in Tab-
le 7 to analyse tenants satisfaction with the
various attributes of the housing maintenance
Tab le 6 . Kendalls coefficient of concordance test for tenants satisfaction with maintenance attributes
No. of Cases W ÷2 df Significance
330 0.208 755.894 11 0.000
systems, using a scale from 1 = Very dissatis-
fied to 7 = Very satisfied. The results show that
the quality of the environment and surround-
ings is the maintenance attribute most satis-
factory to the tenants while the level of main-
tenance backlog is the least satisfactory. The
high, unsatisfactory level of maintenance back-
log stemmed from the fact that in the past five
years the maintenance departments received
just about 15 % of their actual budgetary re-
quirements from the institutions.
SPSS Valid Percentage Scores Maintenance attribute 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Severity
index (%) Rank
Procedures for reporting defects and
getting work done 14.2 22.2 8.8 31.3 10.9 11.1 1.6 48.93 6
Maintenance departments’
complaints response time 22.7 26.5 17.3 22.4 6.4 4.1 0.5 39.61 9
Behaviour of maintenance staff 12.1 17.8 9.6 35.9 12.4 10.3 1.8 50.93 5
Level of maintenance backlog 23.6 24.4 19.1 22.5 6.1 3.4 0.8 39.46 10
Level of nuisance (i.e. disturbance
and interference with your privacy
by maintenance staff
5.2
7.6
9.5
29.9
20.9
22.6
4.3
62.67 2
Speed of work (i.e. time taken by
maintenance staff to do repairs in
your house)
17.2 19.8 12.4 31.9 8.7 7.9 2.1 46.74 7
Quality of repairs done by
maintenance staff in your house 7.0 8.9 10.2 35.5 14.4 20.6 3.4 59.54 3
Cost to tenant (i.e. money/time you
spend reporting faults, transporting
maintenance staff and buying some
materials, if any
23.0
22.2
14.8
27.7
6.9
4.5
1.1
41.69
8
Functionality of the house (i.e. your
enjoyment of the use of the house
and services like water, electricity,
etc.)
8.8 12.9 7.3 32.3 16.7 17.7 4.3 57.93 4
Aesthetics of the house 6.2 11.9 7.3 39.5 16.6 16.9 1.6 57.93 4
The environment and surroundings
of your house 5.8 6.3 6.1 30.2 19.5 24.1 7.9 64.99 1
Tab le 7. Tenants satisfaction rating of attributes of the maintenance system

& A. A. Oladapo
Table 8 shows that out of the 391 respond-
ents, 129 (33.1 %) rated their satisfaction with
the overall maintenance of their dwellings be-
low average while 111 (28.4 %) rated it above
average. Only 14 respondents (3.6 %) were
Very satisfied while 37 (9.5 %) were Very
unsatisfied. The majority of 151 (38.6 %) were
only averagely satisfied.
Applying the formula for severity index (ex-
plained in the methodology) to the results in
Table 8, an overall tenant satisfaction index
(TSI) of 0.55 is obtained, which on a scale of 0
to 1 is just average.
In Table 9, the overall rating (from 1 = Very
bad to 7 = Very good) of the state of mainte-
nance of the houses by the tenants is pre-
sented. Again, using the formula for severity
index earlier given, a state of maintenance in-
dex (SMI) of 0.57 is calculated from the re-
sults in Table 9. The SMI is just above aver-
age on a scale of 0 to 1.
Rating Frequency Valid percent Cumulative percent
1. Very unsatisfied 37 9.5 9.5
2. Unsatisfied 46 11.8 21.2
3. Quite unsatisfied 46 11.8 33.0
4. Average 151 38.6 71.6
5. Quite satisfied 48 12.3 83.9
6. Satisfied 49 12.5 96.4
7. Very satisfied 14 3.6 100.0
Total 391 100.0
Table 8. Tenants satisfaction with the state of maintenance of their dwellings
Table 9. Overall maintenance rating of the housing stock by tenants
Rating Frequency Valid percent Cumulative percent
1. Very bad 30 7.7 7.7
2. Bad 41 10.6 18.3
3. Quite bad 44 11.3 29.6
4. Average 150 38.7 68.3
5. Quite good 56 14.4 82.7
6. Good 52 13.4 96.1
7. Very good 15 3.9 100.0
Total 388 100.0
The second null hypothesis that There is
no significant correlation between users per-
ception of the level of maintenance of a par-
ticular dwelling and the prevalent level of user
satisfaction is tested in Table 10 by running
Pearsons correlation between the tenants
overall rating of the state of maintenance of
their dwellings (from very bad to very good)
and their satisfaction with the overall mainte-
nance of their dwellings.
The analysis in Table 10 indicates a posi-
tive correlation between the two variables. For
p < 0.01, the correlation is highly significant at
the 1 % level. Hence we reject the null hypoth-
esis that There is no significant correlation
between users perception of the level of main-
tenance of a particular dwelling and the preva-
lent level of user satisfaction and accept the
alternative hypothesis that There is signifi-
cant correlation between users perception of
the level of maintenance of a particular dwell-

'
A Study of Tenants Maintenance Awareness, Responsibilyty and Satisfaction in ...
ing and the prevalent level of user satisfaction.
This implies that the tenant satisfaction index
of 0.55 obtained represents the true level of
tenant satisfaction based on the actual state of
maintenance of the dwellings and not on ex-
traneous factors. The maintenance depart-
ments can therefore rely on the results as feed-
back from the tenants to guide their decisions
to improve performance
6. CONCLUSIONS
This paper reports the results of a ques-
tionnaire survey of 406 tenants in 3 large in-
stitutional housing estates in Nigeria. The aim
of the survey was to assess tenants mainte-
nance awareness and responsibility as well as
their level of satisfaction with the maintenance
of their houses. The findings show that most
of the tenants had the correct understanding
of the rationale for maintenance and a high
sense of responsibility towards the mainte-
nance of their houses. This level of awareness
and responsibility may be because the tenants
were highly educated people, possessing quali-
fications ranging from first degrees or diplo-
mas to doctorates in various fields.
There was agreement among the tenants
on the priority order of competing repair de-
mands. Also, there was no significant differ-
ence in the priority preferences of the tenants
and the maintenance departments. The ten-
ants satisfaction with state of maintenance of
Table 10. Correlation between user satisfaction and state of maintenance
their houses was just average, with the qual-
ity of the environment/surroundings and the
backlog of maintenance work rated as the most
and the least satisfactory attributes of the
maintenance systems respectively. The study
showed that tenants perceptions of and satis-
faction with the state of maintenance of their
houses was based on the actual conditions of
their houses. This study should therefore serve
as a good feedback to the maintenance depart-
ments and guide them in taking remedial
measures to improve their performance and
boost tenants satisfaction.
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SANTRAUKA
KÀ NIGERIJOS GYVENTOJAI ÞINO APIE INSTITUCIJØ BÛSTØ PRIEÞIÛRÀ,
KOKS JØ ATSAKOMYBËS LYGIS IR KAIP JUOS TENKINA ÐIE BÛSTAI
Adebayo A. OLADAPO
Nigerijoje bûsto problema yra ir kiekybinë, ir kokybinë. Kokybinis aspektas, susijæs su turimø iðtekliø prieþiûra,
tapo svarbesnis kilus poreikiui iðsaugoti ir sutvarkyti turimus iðteklius, kad jie atitiktø priimtinus gyvenimo standartus.
Institucijø bûstø gyventojø yra gana daug, jie tiesiogiai patiria nesuremontuotø bûstø nepatogumø. Taigi jie suinteresuoti
prisidëti prie namø prieþiûros optimizavimo, nors tam naudojami labai riboti prieþiûros departamentø iðtekliai.
Siekiant ávertinti, kà ið tiesø gyventojai þino apie prieþiûrà ir koks jø atsakomybës lygis, bei kiekybiðkai iðanalizuoti
jø pasitenkinimà namø prieþiûros bûkle, buvo atliktas tyrimas. Rezultatai parodë, kad gyventojai yra labai atsakingi
ir daug þino apie bûsto prieþiûrà, bet jø pasitenkinimas namø prieþiûra tëra vidutinis.