The termite infestation problem at The Tre Ver is a textbook case of what happens when DLP inspections and rectification works aren’t followed through properly.
According to the Straits Times report, more than 50 units at The Tre Ver have raised termite complaints since December 2022, based on a WhatsApp group chat among affected owners. The condo obtained its TOP in late 2022, which means these complaints started almost immediately after handover, squarely within the window where the Defects Liability Period should have caught this. Yet UOL has only confirmed around 15 affected units to date, and both the developer and the MCST declined to disclose the full number affected. That gap between 50-plus complaints and 15 acknowledged cases is itself worth sitting with. Either the reports weren’t tracked consistently, or they were tracked but never escalated with enough urgency. Drywood termite colonies can also go undetected for years before the damage surfaces, which makes early, consistent logging even more important, not less.
Whose Property Is It, Really?
This is where the ownership question gets murky. Kitchen cabinets and other interior fittings are typically not common property, so an MCST or MA isn’t automatically on the hook for damage inside a unit. That’s often used as the reason a case gets closed at the owner’s expense. But a recent case shows that reasoning doesn’t always hold. Freesia Woods MCST was recently ordered by the courts to compensate a couple whose kitchen cabinets, sink, and countertop were damaged by termites, after the court found the infestation originated from common property soil that the MCST had failed to keep termite-free. The damages awarded were S$10,978, but the MCST was also hit with over S$42,750 in legal costs, bringing the total payout to more than S$53,000. In other words, the actual repair cost was a fraction of what the case ended up costing the MCST once it went to litigation. That’s the real lesson here: it’s rarely the termites that bankrupt an MCST, it’s the legal and reputational cost of not having a clear paper trail on when the issue was first flagged and what was done about it.
Council members are volunteers, and most don’t have the bandwidth to chase every unit’s complaint history or verify whether their MA actually followed up. That’s not a criticism of any individual council or MA, it’s just the reality of how strata management is structured today. But it means that when something like this goes unresolved for years, the MCST as a whole ends up carrying the cost, financial and otherwise, of a process breakdown that no single person was positioned to catch. This is exactly the gap Basementgrid is built to close: not replacing the BM or MA, but making sure complaints, inspections, and follow-ups are visible to more than just the person handling the case, so an issue like this can’t quietly sit for years before anyone in leadership notices.
Construction Gets Graded. Management Doesn’t.
There’s also a broader industry signal worth pointing out. BCA has run CONQUAS since 1989 to assess construction workmanship, things like water seepage and tile defects, and grades developers and builders from Band 1 (very low incidence of major defects) down to Band 6. Construction quality has a public benchmark. Managing agent performance doesn’t, at least not yet. As termite and maintenance disputes keep surfacing, it wouldn’t be surprising if BCA or another body eventually moves toward some form of MA accountability framework. In the meantime, it’s a good practice for MA firms to get ahead of this themselves, using a system that lets management track how their building managers are performing across sites and step in before a case escalates.
The Underlying Reality
It’s not really a secret that managing agent fees are competitive, and that a lot of building managers are non-specialists, often retirees, rather than trained facilities professionals. None of that is a knock on the people doing the job. It’s exactly why a system that standardizes how issues get logged, escalated, and tracked matters as much for protecting the MA’s own reputation as it does for the MCST’s.