Despite most buildings confirming to life-safety requirements in modern seismic design codes, enormous financial losses are still incurring from many recent major seismic events around the globe. One tool to quantify and identify the source of these losses is seismic loss estimation, which considers losses arising from building damage, occupancy disruption (downtime) and death/injury. While significant progress had been made to simplify loss estimation procedures for easier applications, they are still not readily usable in everyday engineering design practice. One reason for this is due to insufficient information being readily available regarding the inevitable variations in the type and density of different structural and non-structural building components present in buildings of different occupancy types. This study aims to establish groups of building occupancy types based on similar initial cost ratio of the three key performance groups; structural components, non-structural drift-sensitive components, and non-structural accelerationsensitive components. This involved extracting component construction/installation costs from a New Zealand construction cost handbook for a range of different building occupancy types, summing the costs based on the three performance groups, then grouping the occupancy types based on similar structural and non-structural component costs. Weighting factors for each performance group, which represent the ratio of the performance group cost to the total cost, were then proposed for each building occupancy group. It should be noted that while the methodology adopted in this study can be used in other regions, the specific values and building occupancy groups proposed in this paper is specific to New Zealand application. A total of 79 different occupancy types were considered and grouped into four different building occupancy categories. Mean values of the performance group weighting factors for each occupancy category was computed and proposed. A case study demonstrating the application of the proposed weighting factors in rapid seismic loss estimation is provided. The results of this case study were compared against ones derived using more resource-intensive component-level seismic loss estimation calculations, where it was found that both approaches provided similar estimates. This showed that the simplified approach was not only easier and quicker to apply, but was also reasonably accurate

Component Cost; Building Occupancy Group; Performance Group Weighting Factor; Seismic Loss Estimation