Mr Erwin Fornasier
Former Senior Executive Manager of Developments and Asset Services at Wentworth Community Housing
Licenced Builder
Bachelor of Building Degree in Construction Management
I was literally born on a building site, it’s my passion and interest.
I spent 13 years at Housing NSW, in various roles where I oversaw the development, disposal and maintenance of a portfolio of 33,000 dwellings across the Sydney region.
I joined Wentworth Community Housing Group in 2012 as Senior Executive Manager of Developments and Asset Maintenance. In this role,…
I was responsible for a $44 Million dollar budget for New housing and re-developments and managing the maintenance of some 2200 dwellings, with a maintenance budget of $10 Million. I can say that whatever can go wrong in a building, I guess I’ve seen it.
My responsibilities to my board were many, at the top of this list, was their directions to minimise maintenance costs, and deliver new affordable housing and buildings that were (as much as possible) defect and maintenance free.
Whilst at Wentworth, I was responsible for the roll out of a design and construct project under the Affordable housing initiate.
Being a design and construct project, there was a fixed price to deliver these buildings, on budget, and on time. From my own past experience, I understand that developers & builders need to remain competitively priced, so there is always a sense of urgency and this creates a risk that they and their sub contractors may cut corners,…it’s an unfortunate natural behaviour. Even with their best intentions & promises to deliver defect free and clean new buildings, I know this is not possible without a comprehensive quality management process.
My true duty of Care to the housing board, (like any other construction manager), was to deliver 100% quality. This of course would start with the usual front end checks, of Licence, Insurances, references and site inspections, but for me, this also meant finding experts to assist me. Naturally, I’d question, is a particular expert actually going to do their job properly… So for me it was important to find the right experts to do the job right. They all appeared to have the right inspection equipment, but none impressed me more than Holpro.
Holpro’s references, experience and reporting format was everything I needed. And their reputation surpassed all of the others,… so choosing Holpro was a very easy decision.
Without the Holpro reports, we couldn’t have possibly known about all the defects that got discovered. And we used the Holpro reports to successfully hold the developer accountable, and to make good.
I can comfortably say that the best thing about working with Holpro, was that they delivered exactly what I expected. Holpro is 100% reliable and accurate, and their professional reports helped save the community housing group a lot of money in future hidden maintenance cost.