What is building maintenance is the question a new facilities coordinator, a property owner or a school business manager asks when the building becomes their responsibility. The answer is the care of everything in a building that can fail: the plant, the systems, the fabric and the grounds, done on a schedule with records, so that the building is safe, compliant and working. This page sets out the scope of building maintenance and management, the assets it covers, and the records it keeps; the common misspelling building maintenace arrives here too, and the answer is the same.
The scope
Plant: heating, cooling, ventilation, hot water, pumps, generators. Systems: electrical distribution, fire detection and suppression, emergency lighting, security, lifts, water treatment. Fabric: roof, envelope, glazing, doors, floors, finishes. Grounds: drainage, paving, lighting, landscaping. And the daily life of the building: the requests from occupants about lights, doors, temperature and leaks. Building maintenance is all of it; what a site does in-house and what it contracts out varies, and the record is the site's either way.
How it is organised and managed
A register of the building's assets. A schedule of tasks against each, by calendar mostly, with the statutory tests. A request route for occupants. A technician or a contractor doing the work. A record of what was done, with the certificates. And a manager reading the overdue list, the requests by area and the cost, and revising the schedule from them. Managed well it is quiet; managed badly it is a sequence of emergencies, and the reactive share of the work is how you tell which.
Building maintenance against facilities management
Facilities management runs the building as a service to its occupants: cleaning, security, catering, space, and the maintenance among them. Building maintenance is the engineering part: keeping the plant, the systems and the fabric working. On this estate the facilities hubs cover the service; this hub covers the equipment and the record, which is the part a CMMS holds.
The record a well-run building keeps
The asset register. The schedule and its compliance. Every work order with findings. The certificates for every statutory test, filed against the asset and readable in date order. The requests by area and their response times. Those five answer the inspector, the insurer, the owner and the occupant, and they are the same records whether they live in a CMMS or in the maintenance log worksheet on this site.
Questions people ask about what is building maintenance
Is building maintenance the same as property maintenance?
Property maintenance usually means the landlord's care of let buildings, with tenants and leases in it. Building maintenance is the engineering care of any building; the record is the same.
What qualifications does building maintenance need?
A trade or a building services background for the technician, and the site's own training for the statutory tests. Much of the plant work is contracted to licensed trades.
What does building maintenance cost?
The schedule's tasks priced plus last year's reactive spend, from the record. A building with no record can only guess.