Once a party has purchased a property, whether this is for investment purposes or for occupation, it is necessary to consider planned maintenance to ensure that the building performs satisfactorily for future years. If you have purchased a property as an investment, it is essential that a programme of planned maintenance is instigated to ensure that the building is maintained, and perhaps enhanced, and that the full potential of the asset value is realised.

If you have purchased the property for owner occupation, planned maintenance and repair is essential, firstly to comply with your repairing obligations under the terms of your lease and secondly to ensure that the building performs satisfactorily to allow your use of the building to continue without disruption to your business.

In either situation, without a programme of planned maintenance, problems can arise. It often happens that those reponsible for building maintenance undertake repairs on an ad hoc reactive basis, which is often an expensive way to deal with remedial works. All too often, people fail to prevent problems prior to them occurring, which can often result in downtime to a business operation, loss of productivity and ultimately extra costs.  This could veryl easily be prevented through good planned maintenance.

By assessing in advance the condition of the building elements and budgeting for repairs/renewal of these items in a programme of planned maintenance, disruption and considerable unneccessary expense can be avoided.

If you are a landlord, you will often have obligations to maintain and repair common areas, these costs usually being recovered through a service charge from the tenants. If you find yourself in this situation, it is essential to be able to schedule future repairs to common areas through planned maintenance so that service charge costs can be planned and possibly balanced out over several years, to ease the pressure of recoverable costs from your tenants.