Prioritising the maintenance of university hostels to improve students' satisfaction

The maintenance of university hostels is found to be unsatisfactory due to budget constraint in general. Hence, the purpose of this study is to find out a solution to improve the building maintenance and students' satisfaction within the budget allocation. The development of maintenance prioritisation framework through the association between conditions of building components and students' satisfaction is done to achieve the purpose of this research. Seven main building components were listed after a thorough literature review. Then, a total of 415 valid questionnaire responses were analysed to measure the conditions of building components and to establish the relationship between the conditions of building components and students' satisfaction. Moreover, semi-structured interviews were carried out to validate and further interpret the survey findings. The research findings confirmed that utilities and floor as the significant building components to be prioritised in maintenance. It is worthwhile to be served as a guide to other university hostels. Furthermore, it opens a research opportunity to cover other institution hostels. This research is informative to the university hostel managements in efforts to improve the maintenance efficiency within limited budget. This study proposes a solution to tackle the maintenance issues in university hostels.