Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to present defects reported by cooperative owners, and to determine the relationship between building characteristics, developer's/contractor's company size and defect type. Design/methodology/approach -The analysis is based on defects reported by board members of cooperatives in Sweden through a survey questionnaire. The 1,563 questionnaires were posted by regular mail to the boards of cooperatives for buildings. The current research presents results from

more »

... nalysis of responses from 394 regular residential projects constructed between 2006 and 2013. The responses represent owners' experience from a total 1,107 buildings. Findings -Findings presented in this study indicate that building quality might be one of the factors contributing to the energy gap. The analysis indicates that the most severe problems reported by cooperatives are issues related to building envelope, particularly shortcomings in the function of windows, issues related to the function of the balcony and cracks in the facade and leakage caused by rain water. The results show that the building quality differs depending on developers' size, measured by number of employees. The authors have also found a significant relationship between reported defects and location expressed by size of the city/municipality. Originality/value -The discussion on newly constructed residential buildings has been dominated by the perspective of professionals (inspectors) and contractors (or developers) rather than of the owners/users themselves. This study presents findings from the owners' perspective, thus contributing the owners' viewpoint to the debate on building quality. There is a consensus among politicians, scholars and practitioners that more efficient energy use is fundamental to realizing goals to reduce CO 2 emissions and is essential for future sustainable energy systems. Resolutions signed by EU countries (EPBD 2002/91/EC, 2003 Recast, E.P.B.D., 2010) created a joint path aimed at significantly improving the energy consumption of buildings. Building energy performance is determined by the choices of building fabric, orientation, form and application of technical solutions and the installation system (Sorrell, 2003) . In order to achieve energy efficient buildings, a number of design strategies must be applied and these include: an insulated airtight building envelope, avoidance of thermal bridges and leakages, reduction of losses through transmission, infiltration and ventilation and a carefully designed and balanced ventilation and heating system (Schnieders and Hermelink, 2006; Georgiou and Hacking, 2012; Pacheco et al., 2012) . However, despite the effort put into design, sharing experience and continuous improvement of building regulations, the actual energy consumption is far from the expected (Allard et al., 2013). The energy calculations are computed based on the assumption that the building in operation perfectly corresponds to the designed building. Potential failures, defects or malfunctions are not taken into consideration.