Enforcement of regulations that ensures proper costing of buildings by professional will go a long way in curtailing the incidents of building collapse in the country.

President of Nigeria Institute of Quantity Surveyors (NIQS), Mr. Agele Alufohai, stated this in a paper presented on “Estimating the cost of building collapse in Nigeria” at a workshop organised recently by the National Building and Road Research Institute in Abuja. He said that buildings constitute economic asset, noting that collapse of buildings due to poor costing could have dire economic consequences.

He said the cost of a building should be rigorously calculated by quantity surveyors and designs are made by different professionals involved in the building process such as architects, surveyors and engineers before construction work commences.

“Since buildings are investment assets which yield income directly or are used to assist the process of income generation through the production of goods and services, a collapsed building may be potentially an asset lost. The impact on the personal, corporate, state and national economy is obviously negative, and the level or extent would depend on the outstanding useful life of the building,” he said.

According to him, costing is a very important factor in building procurement, noting that every building has a life cycle, which must be factored in at the point of erection.