What does a portfolio-wide weathertightness assessment actually find?

Across three Newmarket office buildings sharing the same building envelope design, Aamsko and Zenith Facilities Services found four related but distinct sources of water and moisture ingress — from flooding balconies to a failing internal gutter system — giving the owner one coordinated view of building condition rather than three separate, unconnected repair jobs.

The problem: three buildings, one ageing envelope design

The three buildings share a building envelope built from precast and in-situ concrete, concrete masonry block and glazed aluminium curtain wall — a design era with recurring weaknesses when it starts to age. The owner needed real insight into the health and longevity of all three buildings before committing to an investment and renovation plan across the portfolio, not a best guess based on whichever building was complaining loudest.

The approach: forensic testing to ASTM E 2128, across all three buildings

Zenith Facilities Services carried out forensic water and moisture ingress documentation under ASTM E 2128 guidelines, combining internal and external visual inspection with moderately invasive internal inspection and AAMA 511 water ingress testing at the roof, walls and joinery of all three buildings. Aamsko then produced detailed drawings mapping exactly where and how water was entering, building by building.

Three buildings, tested the same way, found the same kind of failure repeating — which is exactly the value of assessing a portfolio together instead of chasing each leak on its own building.

What the testing found

3buildings assessed under one coordinated investigation
4distinct ingress sources identified and drawn
ASTM E 2128forensic testing standard applied throughout
  • Concrete cantilever balconies. Incorrect fall and drainage were letting the balconies flood, with water entering past an inadequate door upstand and seeping through the cold joint between the balcony deck and the parapet wall. Sustained damp had carbonated the masonry parapet, cracking it, corroded the steel balustrade rail beyond safe use, and started incipient anode syndrome where the concrete around the rail mountings had begun to spall.
  • Internal gutter system. The plywood-substrate, metal box gutters and their waterproof membrane had exceeded their useful service life. AAMA 511 testing confirmed the gutters — undersized, poorly falled, and workmanship-compromised — were letting water pool for long periods, degrading the waterproofing and timber substrate and eventually overflowing into the building interior.
  • Protruding fin detail. On two of the three buildings, radial concrete masonry fins showed efflorescence and paint-adhesion failure where they penetrated the interior, tracking along the masonry joints to the exterior. Testing at the nearby internal gutter showed water leaking through a gap in the system and splashing directly onto a load-bearing pillar.
  • Intertenancy party wall. A ground-floor reinforced concrete masonry wall showed damp rising from both sides, with paint failure concentrated at its base — consistent with moisture originating from the carpark below, where the retaining wall showed matching water marks and mould growth.

The result

Rather than four unrelated repair quotes across three buildings, the owner received one coordinated diagnostic picture — the actual condition of the whole portfolio, the shared design weaknesses behind it, and the basis for a single, sequenced investment and renovation plan.