It has been quite a journey these last few months. McDonald Surveys was certainly not immune to the early impacts of COVID-19. It felt like every major construction project ground to a halt or faced major delays overnight, and immediate decisions needed to be made to support our workforce and look for opportunities to adapt.

Fortunately, our reputation for innovative solutions supported the first conversations had with client’s post-restrictions, and we quickly saw client requests for innovative and collaborative methods to continually delivering our services. This was very much about keeping construction on track while managing COVID-19 the right way.

One silver-lining of those first few remote-working weeks in March was that many of our site-based staff were available to contribute to our internal planning. We hosted some online workshops to agree on the best ideas and come up with tangible solutions quickly.

Prior to COVID-19, dilapidation surveying was focused on the risk posed by the asset being surveyed. But this quickly changed to the focus being managing the human risk associated with a surveyor entering a premise and spreading or catching COVID-19. Home owners were extremely wary, and government had new restrictions in place, but projects could not afford to have this critical stage delayed.

A specific situation arose where the Public Transport Authority was going to see a major impact from delays in dilapidation surveys for the Claremont Station project, as part of Metronet. They required a solution that would remove the need for a surveyor to enter the premises to survey and still deliver a survey. Within a couple of days, and leveraging a lot of the tech and equipment used in our existing process, we had developed a resident self-survey solution and a trial was approved by the PTA.

After successfully demonstrating that a resident could self-survey their house, and with the help of our dilapidation surveying cloud-platform Inspective, the turnaround time and quality of surveys was comparable to the prior model and the PTA received approval from the Premiers office to move forward.

We are now offering the resident self-survey option in all current and future works so as to help residents maintain control in the safety of their families and their home in these unprecedented times.

To better understand the resident self-survey process we have produced a walk-through video: https://vimeo.com/415047568