How to Create a Strata Maintenance Plan and Reduce Costs in One Day

Bonus Material: Free Annual Maintenance Plan Checklist

In this guide, I’m going to show you how to create an annual maintenance plan specific to your building. This is the same maintenance plan framework used to keep hotels and apartment buildings looking brand new 5, 10 and 15 years after construction. 

What is a maintenance plan?

Annual maintenance planning is the process of creating an efficient and organised set of maintenance works for your building. To ensure that your building is presented to the best quality of cleanliness and maintenance.

To create the “optimised” maintenance plan you will need to consider

• Important areas and features of the building
• Times when most people are using the building
• Equipment that’s imperative to the buildings smooth operation
• Trades that are needed
• Weather conditions in your area
• Budget to maintain your building

Why do you need a maintenance plan?

Efficiency

Reactive maintenance is inefficient for your time and more expensive when compared to preventative maintenance. Reactive maintenance management resembles crisis management and brings doubt into the operation of all other parts of the building, if a Committee or Manager waits for people to complain about a matter it is likely that many more people have seen the same damaged part of the building and have just made their mind up about the running of the building. 

Transparency 

With a maintenance plan, you can see on a page all your trades and when they will be onsite, this makes adding additional maintenance task simpler and often at a lower cost than bringing your tradespeople onsite two (2) weeks in a row.

By understanding the maintenance needs and displaying them on a schedule you can be agile in the management of your building, and easily move to meet the unplanned maintenance with the planned with reduced your admin workload and occupier disruption.

Cost Management

Cash flow and quotations are two important parts to every business but are often forgotten or mismanaged in the running of an apartment building. Your annual maintenance plan quickly accounts for these two important responsibilities. 

By scheduling your maintenance you will understand when your payments are due and when considered against your large invoices like insurance, utilities and levy income you will immediately know if your cash flow is healthy enough to support your maintenance plans.

Apartment buildings are regularly drowning in quotations because they organise 2, 3 or 4 quotations for most maintenance requests. With a maintenance plan and organised tradespeople, you can schedule your quotations or tendering and then utilise these contractors for the minor or major jobs during the year once you have established a pricing level you are both happy to accept.

Presentation

Every building has a few key dates every year when the building has the majority of people at home, and visitors will be coming and going, like Christmas, Easter, and long weekends. 

When you create your maintenance plan it is best to make your building present at its best for these occasions. This will help occupiers feel that little more proud of their home and in turn, care for it that little bit more.

The optimised presentation of your building is often the greatest success from a maintenance plan, typically apartment building move from extreme to extreme in presentation. It will look fantastic and then planned maintenance will be forgotten, so all parts of the building deteriorate, and not until it reaches a very bad condition or a failure occurs maintenance will occur and bring the condition of the building from a low point back to a high. 

Unfortunately, this does little to help people care for the building in the way you would like, whereby the use of a maintenance plan your building will always present and operate as either very good or good. 

By keeping the quality of the building always between very-good and good, you will attract owners that care, tenants that care, and in turn higher returns on your investment.

How do you create a maintenance plan

Every apartment building, group of townhouses or housing estate can and should implement an annual maintenance plan. With these straightforward steps, you can have your first maintenance plan created and implemented within one day.

You can then continue to refine and optimise your plan depending on your building’s complexities and position.