Traditionally the construction industry has been expected to provide buildings that are economical, faster to build, durable with quality finishes. Now days, a balance in quality and sustainability to achieve affordability in residential housing is a major challenge to the construction industry. Service life planning acts as a bridge connecting sustainability and affordability in a building. This is in line with the ISO concept where proper planning of service life of buildings is taken into consideration prior to the construction stage. At University of Technology Malaysia, a tool for service life planning of buildings for local environment is being developed. The service life planning tool incorporates factors that affect building performance to predict the service life of the building components, economic assessment i.e. life cycle costing of the building and qualitative assessment of the building sustainability.