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MANAGING RETENTION IN RESIDENTIAL BUILDING PROJECTS

CHAPTER ONE

1.0 INTRODUCTION

Residential building projects consist of complex interrelated subsystems of cost centers which often require huge financial commitment. The huge financial commitment therefore makes monitoring the disbursement and flow of financial resources a worthwhile task.

Therefore, in order to maximize fund on various cost centers, client and project actors often exhibits restraint in fund disbursement in order to ensure value for fund already released. However, it is the proper management of the process of fund release and retention of some funds that determines the value for money expected on the projects. It is against this background that this study was centered on managing project retention fee in residential building projects in Lagos state, Ogun state, Abuja (F.C.T.) and Port Harcourt in Nigeria. A random sampling technique was used in the study, a population size of 250 residential building projects was used for the study from which sample size of 120 was chosen. Moreover, a structured questionnaire in Likert scale 1-5 was used for the work. Mean Item Score was used to generate the agreement index for the parameters influencing the retention fee management process. It was discovered that most deducted retention percentage is 5% of the project cost. Also, the type of intervention system often used as alternative intervention system was studied, the most advocated intervention system is paying interest on retention when delayed, followed by release of retention on line-item basis. There should be adequate compensation for the fund tied down. However, the following intervention system could be used: release of retention fee on line-item basis, introduction of letter of credit, application of bond as alternative of retention fee, application of performance bond, financial security package, the use of escrow account for retention fee, use of payment bond and performance bond among others.

The combination of two or three or all of them should guarantee adequate management of the fund. However, there are challenges often encountered in the fund administration these includes; delay in the release of fund, reduction in contractors fee and retention fee reduces contractor’s profit if all the retained fund is used to remedy bad work among others. Factor Analysis. in Regression Analysis of SPSS software was used to generate factors for a suitable fee management model by reducing the factors to their Coefficients and Eigen Values. The model would assist clients and project actors in management of project elements retention fee on residential building sites.