The short version
Six steps. Two of them are yours; four of them are ours.
- Engagement and scoping — committee
- Survey — provider
- Analysis and defect schedule — provider
- On-site verification — qualified inspector
- Professional sign-off — qualified inspector / architect
- Submission — provider or committee
The technical work is not the slow part. Steps 1 and 4 are.
Step 1 — Engagement and scoping
For a residential building, facade work is maintenance of common property, which under the Condominium Administration Act generally requires a management committee resolution or an owners' meeting decision. A building manager can run procurement; the authorising decision still has to be minuted.
Scoping establishes: total facade area, cladding materials by elevation, building height and storey count, known problem areas, and whether the building is on the authority's register for this filing round.
Where it slips: committees that discover the requirement close to a deadline have to convene a meeting, agree a budget, and run a procurement — three sequential steps, none of which compress well. This is the single largest source of delay in the whole process.
What helps: put facade survey into the annual maintenance budget at the regular owners' meeting, before there is a deadline in view. A line item that already exists does not need a special meeting.
Step 2 — Survey
The site work. For a drone survey, this is one to three days for a whole building, depending on storey count and facade area, and runs in four passes: panoramic 3D model, visible-light detail, infrared thermal for hollowing, then close capture of anything the first three flagged.
No scaffolding, no road-occupancy permit, no closed circulation routes. Residents are notified but not displaced.
Where it slips: weather. Thermal survey needs a dry facade and an active heating or cooling window, so a wet week pushes the thermal pass. Building slack into the programme is normal.
Step 3 — Analysis and defect schedule
Imagery is processed and defects classified — cracking, hollowing, spalling, water ingress, surface ageing — each with coordinates, a severity grade and paired visible/thermal images. The output is a defect schedule and a building health score.
This is provider work with no committee involvement, and typically takes one to two weeks.
Step 4 — On-site verification
A qualified inspector recognised by the Department of Urban Development attends the site, reviews the flagged findings, confirms the significant ones and takes responsibility for the diagnosis.
This step is not a formality and it is not skippable. For defect classes that can fall and injure — spalling, bulging, delamination, exposed rebar — automated classification may offer an opinion but has no authority to dismiss a finding. The determination is the professional's.
Where it slips: availability. There are roughly 800 qualified diagnostic personnel nationwide, against thousands of buildings phased into filing rounds. As a deadline approaches, their diaries fill. This is the second major source of delay, and it is entirely a function of when you started.
Step 5 — Professional sign-off
The inspector signs the inspection report. Where significant defects were found, a diagnostic remediation report is additionally required, signed by a licensed architect or a practising civil or structural engineer.
The report format follows the authority's prescribed structure: diagnosis declaration form, current-condition photographs, defect record schedule.
Step 6 — Submission
The completed, signed report is submitted to the authority. Providers commonly handle this as an add-on service; some committees prefer to submit themselves. Either is fine — what matters is that it happens before the deadline and that the committee retains a copy.
The two things worth doing early
Check the register. Whether your building is in the current filing round is a matter of public record, and it determines your timeline.
Get the budget line approved before you need it. The resolution is the step you cannot outsource and cannot compress. Everything else can be scheduled.
If you want the survey side handled — including report formatting for sign-off — book an asset assessment or call +886-2-7733-7678. What we would suggest first, though, is establishing what condition the facade is actually in, because that is the input to every decision downstream of it.
