I have not been to the office of many quantity surveying firms, nor do I know many people in the profession. However, as soon as you walk into Kwanto's Eden Terrace office you can tell they are not your run of the mill QS firm. It looks more like a boutique-advertising agency, or a slick PR firm and James White, the founding director, in his expensive suit and fashionable glasses does not look like an archetypal QS. White is trying to both change the image of the profession and raise its profile in an industry that does not often understand the role of a QS. At 32 years old his peers may view him as something of an upstart, and he makes no bones about what he is trying to achieve. But there's more to White than just image. In Kwanto he has established a quantity surveying frim that is gaining  a reputation for being about quality not just quantity. He also sees the role of a QS as vital to the industry. If he has his way, a QS will be as valuable a part of a building project as the architect or builder.

Why did you become a quantity surveyor?

I fell into is by accident really. I left school at 18 and saw an advert for a job that said you must have an appreciation of maths and have an eye for art. I still don't know where the art aspect comes from.

Why didn't you follow the normal path of university?

I wasn't really set on what I wanted to do. I didn't want to commit to something I wasn't fully behind.

Where did you train to be a QS?

In my very early days I worked for a company called The Estimator and I was a young, hungry, cocky school leaver. I stayed there for three years and ended up becoming the office manager. I got offered the franchise but thought I was too young to take that step. I went overseas and got a role with the Irish Gas Board where I was in design and distribution. I did a little bit of design and a lot of estimation and that gave me a good appreciation of how other countries work. Then I came back and returned to The Estimator. I decided being a QS interested me, but I wanted to get a formal qualification so I went to the Wellington Institute of Technology to study. After Uni I joined a firm called Ortus International in Wellington. They had offices in Singapore and the UK, there was a lot of insurance valuation work happening in South East Asia. Under their umbrella I worked on the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur.

Why did you branch out on your own?

I became the Auckland manager at Ortus International and was commuting a fair bit between Auckland and Wellington. The firm was steering me in a project management direction and I wasn't really comfortable with that. I was resisting that to some extent and I thought I should find out by myself and carve my own destiny. I wanted to make a difference and lift the profile of quantity surveying. I think it's a good career and it's a function of an industry, however there is a lack of understanding about what QS's do.

How do you change that?

I am not suggesting that I know more than anyone else but the profession needs young blood. There needs to be a next generation of quantity surveyors coming through looking at it a different way, embracing technology, seeing that using software is a hugely efficient way of doing things.

What issues is the profession facing? Do you think it would be a good idea to change the name of quantity surveying to something that describes it better?

Yes and I think that might happen with the changing of the guard and younger guys coming through. The New Zealand Institute of Quantity Surveyors is quite a slow organisation when it comes to adopting change, you have to tap away at it. I think today people don't associate anything with quantity surveying, it doesn't mean anything. If I was to say I was a construction cost consultant for example that would start to better explain the role better. Quantity surveyor is an old term, surveyor is an old term and as for quantity, well we don't just count nails. The role is a lot more proactive than that, making sure the project performs to budget, having an idea of what inflationary pressure does to projects.

Someone once described it to me as a site accountant.

Yes I guess it is. The problem I have with that sort of terminology is that accountants have a reputation for being dry and boring. What we are trying to do at Kwanto is to change the perception of quantity surveyors; we are not stale old men at the back of the office with our pencil and screeds of dimension paper. We are out there and we are listening to the industry and we change what we do on a daily basis to make it better for our clients and to make the estimates more relevant.

You certainly have a different image, you website is slick, this office looks more like an advertising agency. You are really pushing that message of a new breed of QS.

Yes we are, we are not going to hide that we are really pushing the boundaries. Our peers perhaps see us as something provocative, but we are here for the long haul. I really want to establish Kwanto as a name that is associated with the quality and reliability. I started out with a staff of me in a small office and now there are ten of us.

How did you achieve that growth?

In my previous QS life I was working with leaky building assessors and we had a database of five to ten assessors on the books. I saw that as potentially the biggest growth sector of their business, however they saw project management as the growth area. So I saw it was an opportunity to specialise in leaky buildings and that has grown into something that can sustain our business. This year we are looking at getting different skills  into the business and seeing what other sectors we can transfer our skills into.

If we go back to quantity surveying, and this might seem like an odd questions, but why use a quantity surveyor for a building project?

That's a very good question and it is one of the biggest battles the profession face. It comes back to educating people about the value a quantity surveyor can bring.

They are often viewed as a cost.

You might say so but I would argue that we as an investment and not a cost. If we did a full QS service we might be two per cent of the overall cost, but I would like to think a good QS would save three times that. The biggest impact a Qs can have is right at the concept stage, right at the beginning when the project is being designed and ideas are flowing. I think it is really important to involve us in the development of the design and the value engineering that goes into the design. Once a project hits building consent it's harder to pull back costs without affecting the design. The value engineering and the value management side of things say that our best value is early on.

If you take a typical residential project, an architect will draw the plans and the client will then get a few quotes and often go with the lowest, which may well be an unrealistic quote.

It is in some people's make up to accept the lowest price, which is unfortunate because I think there are many non-cost attributable factors that should be considered. A smooth running project where everything is known, it finishes on time and to a high quality is a huge benefit.

How is your relationship on a project with the builder as opposed to the client.

It's getting bigger, and I think that is part of the new approach. I don't like to see it as a them and us situation.  I have been on projects where there has been a fantastic partnering of work ethic and it works better. When you get the key stakeholders involved in the process it runs so much more smoothly. Projects such as that are more often than not built on time and to budget.

Stakeholder partnerships seem to be the way the industry is going.

Well it diminishes the risk; if everything is transparent no one can hide anything. A lot can be said for having meetings up front, talking about a problem, letting it percolate and coming back and talking about it. Back in the day that was seen as a waste of time, but that attitude is changing. For Kwanto and me it is about establishing relationships that will be in place in twenty years and move things forward.

Back to quantity surveying, why do you think it is that people, when they are making the biggest investments that will ever make, are reluctant to use professionals/

Well I think it comes back to them being seen as a cost. Not a lot of people will see that cost benefit. If a project goes smoothly and to budget then people may question the role a QS played, but they won't realise it may not have gone so well if they hadn't used one.

You mentioned that a large part of your business has been with leaky building, in what capacity?

In the early days our role was to carry out remedial estimates for building estimates for building assessors who were engaged through what was the WHRS. They would give us a detailed brief as to what needed doing and we would go along and cost it out. That grew as the industry started to evolve. In the early days most of the assessors were investigation based and that turned into giving expert witness, because mediations and adjudications started to turn up. We then became involved in scheduling work and tender analysis and occasionally procurement. We have also been involved in financial management of projects and back costing. The benefit of being involved with the whole project is that when it goes to mediation or adjudication we have been involved for maybe a year. That put us in a fantastic position when we came to give evidence about the property. That side of business has really blossomed and turned into an industry with an industry. You read reports that it is going to cost $23 million to fix the problem, we will have a role to play.

Is that an accurate figure?

The range they gave was between 42,000 and 80,000 properties that could fall into the leaky building category. The biggest issue is people falling off the ten-year limitation period and not having any sort of comeback. I think the figure is between $11 and $23 billion.

What do you think should be done to solve the problem?

The best thing for the industry is to stop paying for lawyers and just fix the problem.

How do you do that though?

Well it is tough because you have two opposing parties and one saying 'you caused this and this is how much it is going to cost'. The other party is saying 'no I didn't do that it was someone else.'

The blame game has to stop though. A judge even commented on that recently, that it was a systematic failure across the board.

I think the government has to step up. In my opinion the reason the WHRS was set up in the first place was to address the issue of housing stock here. Everyone has their hard earned cash tied up in housing. It's what Kiwis see as the best investment. I think the government has an obligation to act in a bigger capacity than it is now. There was a recent case where a pre-purchase inspector was named on the case. When he got adjudication he was told he had no case to answer but still had to pay his lawyer $45,000. He said if he had known that from the start he would have paid $45,000 to the owner and moved on. It is just going in the wrong direction; people are paying more to their lawyers than they are getting in compensation.

How bad do you think the problem is; are we going to see a serious deterioration of New Zealand's housing stock.

If you look at houses built in the bad years, between 1996 and 2000 then, in my opinion, some of those houses will need pulling down.

The Building Act is under review at the moment and I hear people saying the new act shouldn't be too prescriptive. But the Building Code needs to be prescriptive to avoid leaky buildings happening again. You can't leave everything up to interpretation.

I think so and I think the original changes made in 1991 were to encourage the No.8 fencing wire, New Zealand get up and go and we can make anything work. It has sadly swung too far that way. I think there is merit in the performance based system but I think it has been too flexible. Acceptable solutions are too open to interpretation. I thin asking people to push the envelope is fantastic and there are some good examples of where that has work. But you see some of the building affected by leaks and you just don't get how they were built.

Are you ever surprised by what you see in leaking homes?

Some of the defects and failures I see on the projects are astounding. There are some real head-scratchers as to why they were built that way or even signed off.. Building a house can be broken down into fairly straightforward chunks, it doesn't need to be overcomplicated and I don't think it is complicated. If there is a detail missing in the plans then you go back to the person responsible and get it from them. You don't improvise with what you think is best.

The lack of standard house designs and everyone wanting something different adds to that. There is such a vast array of different types of building product that builders don't know how to use them all.

People do want individuality with their houses and that is the hurdle. I would love to build me own house, who wouldn't? But I am going to make sure it is built properly. I am looking forward to one day building my own house and having some good tradesmen involved. Our role here in dealing with the leaky building issue is fascinating. We deal with all sorts of people but it is a bit like being a policeman and always turning up to the road accident and losing faith in the motoring industry. Dealing with leaky buildings and seeing shoddy workmanship is common, but there are very good tradesmen out there and it's important not to forget that. It's important not to lose faith in the industry.

Are you involved with leaky commercial buildings?

We are starting to become involved. The WHRS Act obviously doesn't cover them. We have looked at three or four over the last three years and other companies are moving into to look at the problem.

Is the commercial side a potential time bomb?

Absolutely, they used the same products, the same processes and architects. It is, but I think a difference between commercial and residential is that the commercial side is a lot less emotionally involved with the project and they can see the value of using professionals.

Does the $11 billion cost of repairing leaky buildings take into account commercial buildings?

I don't think it does. I think that figure is just residential, I don't think it takes schools into account and there are some problems there.

 

 

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