Recent studies have demonstrated the practical usage of the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Performance-Based Earthquake Engineering (PEERPBEE) framework to quantify performance measures, such as monetary losses and downtime, for buildings under seismic conditions. However, in most of these studies the PEER-PBEE framework was applied for traditional buildings.

This research aims, firstly, to provide evidence on the effectiveness in seismic performance of structures with base isolation compared to a fixed base, in terms of the expected annual loss and expected downtime, by performing loss assessment of a case study building that is base isolated. The research finds that the EAL of the base isolated building is 0.0012% with a standard deviation of 0.00028% the building replacement cost. This was found to be around 50-100 times lower than the EAL of a 12-storey and 4-storey traditional steel moment resisting frame office buildings.

Secondly, the cost of inviting a structural engineer to manually inspect and assess the building is considered in the loss analysis. Installing smartphones on the building to function as seismic monitoring system was found to help in reducing the cost of post-earthquake investigation by reducing the cost and downtime associated with manual inspection, and is likely to be beneficial in the long term for reducing cost and downtime.