The building service department's manager, Neil McLeod, said he thought things were going ''really well''.
His feedback so far was that people seemed to appreciate being able to work with a single consent processing officer when applying for a building consent, as opposed to having to deal with several different people under the old system.
Building services now managed to provide about 90% of all site inspections the day following a request, and all site inspections within 48 hours, he said. For the first four months of 2013, which were as busy as usual, with a mix of smaller and large jobs, the average processing time for building consent applications was nine days, and 99.38% of all applications were processed within the 20-working-day period.
In April, the average processing time was 10.5 days. A rush of applications before the April 10 introduction of new fire-related building requirements was stretching the service and was likely to push some applications up to around 20 days, but it was the same across the country.
The council's new turnaround times compared favourably with other councils, which was the aim, he said.
The improvements follow a major shake-up of the service late last year, following concerns from the building industry and council senior management that consent-processing was taking too long and costing too much.
The service is moving from a largely paper-based system, where several people handled applications, to an electronic-based system. Staff have been trained to enable one person to see a consent through the whole process.
Mr McLeod said new electronic systems and computers were still being installed. Staff received training last week, and a trial with outside organisations was about to begin.
Otago Master Builders Federation president Mark Ward said if consents were down to 10 days' processing time, or less, that was ''all good positive stuff''.
