The centre said buildings of that sort were typical in older communities such as Wanganui, Timaru, Oamaru, New Plymouth and Wellington.
The engineers have suggested a government-funded programme to evaluate and test simple, low cost but easily standardised construction works to achieve the necessary resiliency.
"These 'standard form' improvements could then become an alternative and economic means of compliance to the expensive lateral strengthening as proposed in the bill," the CAE said.
Amendments to the bill indicate that old buildings will need to be strengthened to at least 34 per cent of the new building standard.
The original draft legislation adopted a "one-size-fits-all" approach, but an amendment divides the country into three seismic zones of high, medium and low risk.
Wanganui has been included in the medium-risk zone, which means buildings must be assessed within a 10-year period, with the owners then given 25 years to comply with the building regulations.
But the submission from the Wanganui District Council takes it a step further, asking for more of a "risk-based" approach, which would provide greater flexibility to either shorten, extend or exempt parts of buildings based on the level of risk to life posed.
For nearly 25 years, the CAE has made contributions in the fields of infrastructure resilience and natural hazards, energy and construction. A guide it published in 1997 was widely implemented in regional Canterbury and enabled those communities to ride through the 2010 and 2011 Canterbury earthquakes with minimal economic disruption.
But it said few regions of New Zealand had embarked on the resiliency building as undertaken in Canterbury, "and significant opportunities exist to improve preparations for earthquakes in other earthquake prone regions of New Zealand".
The CAE said that, while earthquakes posed a threat to life, they also posed a significant economic risk, and the Government should take a greater role in co-ordinating planning to minimise that.
It also suggested a co-ordinated programme of action was needed to implement routine construction of low-damage building technologies.
This would mean speeding up the completion of guidelines and codes for low damage building technologies in engineered wood, steel, concrete and masonry construction. It could be helped by introducing depreciation allowances for that type of construction to compensate owners for the extra capital costs.