Two sets of digitized earthquake records from the 17-storey reinforced concrete Vogel building in Wellington show considerable differences between the accelerations recorded by the basement and remote site instruments fifty metres apart. The records obtained on the massive box foundation are considerably attenuated for most frequencies above 1Hz, with peak horizontal accelerations ranging from 54% to 85% of the remote site values. Better matches of the measured responses are achieved using the basement records rather than the remote site records as the ground acceleration excitation applied to linear models derived using systematic identification techniques.