Failure to maintain the large number of apartment blocks built in recent years could lead to a serious deterioration in the quality of the urban fabric of our cities and towns, according to a leading chartered surveyor.
Tom Dunne, head of the school of real estate and construction economics at Dublin Institute of Technology, said yesterday that many apartment occupiers did not seem to appreciate the need to set aside a sinking fund to cover long-term maintenance costs.
The latest figures show that apartments now account for 41 per cent of planning permissions for housing throughout the State, rising to 74 per cent in the Dublin area. This represents a major change in the housing stock and is likely to be dominant in the future.
Addressing the National Housing Conference in Cork, Mr Dunne said apartment blocks presented a much more significant maintenance challenge than private houses. Their management was also more expensive because of the need in most cases to appoint managing agents.
Mr Dunne, who is chairman of the Private Residential Tenancies Board, said a reluctance among apartment owners to pay high annual service charges could be detrimental in the long-run because, if buildings were not properly maintained, it could make apartment living unattractive.
One difficulty in developing a "culture of better management" lay in the ownership structures of apartment buildings. These "could be open to abuse in some circumstances and should be reformed", he said, adding that the matter was now being examined by the Law Reform Commission.
Mr Dunne said there was also a need for some form of regulation of managing agents under a State licensing system that would lay down minimum educational qualifications, the independent auditing of clients' accounts, professional indemnity assurance and disclosure of conflicts of interest.
At present, such information was "scant" even though there were 150 managing agents listed in the Golden Pages, only some of whom were auctioneers or estate agents. And though they handled large sums of money, the approach was often "amateur" with little oversight or accountability.
Aidan O'Connor, principal architectural adviser at the Department of the Environment, stressed the need for quality design and durability in new housing. Poor design not only resulted in blighted lives, bleak environments and anti-social behaviour, but was also more costly to put right later.
Richard McCarthy, director general of the British government's Sustainable Communities Group, said its aim was to promote communities that were "active, inclusive and safe, well-run, environmentally sensitive, well-designed and built, well-connected and thriving".
The group's "liveability agenda" was based on making places "cleaner, safer, greener" by creating new parks and public spaces, maintaining them better, improving the physical fabric, engaging and empowering communities, working with young people and tackling anti-social behaviour.