Estimating demolition costs for single residential buildings

With the increasing stock of aging structures, buildingdemolition is becoming a challenging research field fromthe perspective of management. As the converse ofconstruction, management of demolition puts forward somenew management themes or adds some new contentseven though the same issues are faced in constructionmanagement. This research aims to develop a quantitativeapproach to estimate the costs of a demolition project. A cost analysis method is presented to systematically breakdown the cost components involved in the demolition of a structure. Due to the lack of robust research in theory and systematic summary in practice to date, the economic performances of demolition will be studied through a case study, and the majority of parameters are derived from actual experiences in practice. The proposed demolition cost estimation method is applied to the actual form of building elimination (ScenariO 1), and further comparison is carried out with two other elimination methods, which are the newly developed deconstruction (Scenario 2) and mechanical demolition (Scenario 3). Deconstruction is found to be the most profitable in this particular instance, and is closely followed by the actual form.