You know this. Your building will take a lot of work to maintain. Whether it’s a hotel, or apartments, or even a hospital there are many factors to consider in order to look after it and prevent it from falling into disrepair.
Do you have all these maintenance people on your list yet?
- Commercial plumbing services
- Roofing repairers
- Handymen
- Gas fitters
- Electricians
- Professional cleaning services such as window washers
- Builders
- Janitors
- Maintenance technicians
- Lift technicians
To help you manage this process, use our easy guidelines.
Types of Building Maintenance
You have various kinds of building maintenance to take into account:
- Cleaning the different kinds of surfaces: windows, floors, walls, handrails and ceilings as well as lights
- Maintaining and repairing all systems inside the building: HVAC, lifts, emergency generators, servers, security systems
- Looking after the actual building: walls, doors, lights, woodwork, windows
- Maintaining the property outside the building: gardens, paving, driveways, gates, security systems, gate motors and batteries
Use categories to keep track of repairs and schedule maintenance.
Priorities of Building Maintenance
It’s important to prioritise your maintenance, in order to prevent emergencies. For instance, you don’t want people to get stuck in a lift because of lack of maintenance. It’s especially relevant on a public holiday, when it’s difficult to call out a technician. So, consider the following in your maintenance plan:
- Firstly, emergency repairs: Fix things that could cause a safety risk. Repair physical damage to a building, especially where it could make parts of a building collapse. Fix any fault that disrupts one of your systems, be it security, lifts, water, electricity. All of them are best treated as soon as possible to prevent one problem from causing another.
- High-priority tasks: These are tasks that need to be done within a certain number of days so that they don’t turn into emergencies. It’s far better to do these tasks than to deal with major repairs after, for instance, a flood in the basement. You’ll also limit maintenance costs by acting swiftly.
- Medium-priority maintenance: This is regular maintenance that occurs every month to keep the building from falling into disrepair, and to ensure that all systems run smoothly at all times.
- Low-priority tasks: These are tasks that can be done at any time—when funds become available.
- Deferred-maintenance activities: Events that can be postponed, and may either be medium or low priority, but are moved to your backlog list. This can be due to either budget or time constraints.
Why Maintain Your Building?
There are significant benefits to maintaining your building, and keeping it updated. The reasons are discussed below.
Safety
The most obvious reason for maintaining a building is that of safety. If you maintain your building, you won’t have to do emergency repairs. For instance, call in mechanical plumbing services to keep your gasworks or your air-conditioning units up to date. Rather that, than risk a fire which destroys your building.
Compliance to Regulations
There are building safety codes and standards from government which change regularly. You must keep repairs up to date to be ready for inspection. It will also diminish your risk of liability and being sued.
Functionality
Regular maintenance prevents your building from deteriorating. You won’t suffer breakdowns or outages, and even machines won’t have to be replaced as regularly.
Of course, if you keep everything functioning, it saves money in the long run. You also ensure safety and prevent lawsuits and fines from government.
Cost-saving
If you keep maintaining your building and the systems within it, you’ll save costs. A small issue is cheaper to fix than one that has evolved into a huge crisis. This is true for plumbing, structural issues and many more aspects of maintenance.
To help you manage costs, track how long a machine has been used for, and when it needs replacing. Also schedule reminders for maintenance check in order to notice problems before the escalate.
This also relates to being sustainable. Make sure your energy-efficiency is at its peak. Look for leaks, replace parts that are problematic, and save yourself money in the process. For instance, if you have a leaky water pipe, it can not only waste a lot of water, but lead to mould and damp. Both can cost a lot of money in the long run. It’s best to prevent this from happening in the first place, all thanks to regular checks.
Conclusion
Keep on your toes as a property owner! There is a lot of detail to remember and to schedule, and you have to deal with emergencies too. You even have a significant responsibility relating to people’s safety.
It takes a strong person indeed to manage a building, and to manage it well. Few others have such a job, or such an essential one. What do you need to check today?
