Your Facilities Management Guide: How to Plan Preventive Maintenance

When you invest in an apartment building, an office building, or anything else — you're taking a risk. You're betting that you can take care of the building, keeping it in good shape so it holds onto its value. And so, you need to perform regular preventive maintenance on it.

This kind of work can save you thousands of dollars by helping you avoid costly emergency repairs. It helps make sure pipes don't burst, foundations are solid, and nasty mold does not grow behind the walls. It lengthens the life of your assets.

To learn more about how to plan preventative maintenance and protect your investments, keep reading below!

Preventive Maintenance Starts By Collecting Information

The first step in every kind of maintenance plan is to collect as much information as you can. At the very least, you should research when your buildings were built and how many repairs they had. Sometimes though, this kind of information is not readily available.

To find your building's creation date, you may need to reach out to your city hall for records about zoning and planning. Most of the time, they have records on every building in their area.

And to learn more about its maintenance history, professionals may need to examine the building closely. There are always signs of repairs left behind, and professionals know how to find them. By finding them, they can learn about how many repairs the building had.

Keep A List Of Known Emergency Repairs

With that information in hand, you can start identifying areas that may need immediate repairs. The most important areas to work on are areas that may have had emergency repairs in the past. By their very nature, emergency repairs are usually signs that something is seriously wrong.

For example, if there were emergency repairs on a building's leaky pipes, you should do maintenance work on the plumbing. It's not likely that the emergency repairs in the past fixed the underlying problems. The main goal was likely to stop the leak.

By addressing the necessary work beyond the past repairs, an experienced facility management partner can prevent more from happening in the future.

Find Times To Do More Intense Work

If you are running property where people live and work, then it can be difficult to do intense maintenance work. For example, digging into the drywall for HVAC preventive maintenance can disrupt everyone's day. So, you will need to find times when you can perform that work when fewer people are around.

Usually, this tends to fall around the holidays, when people leave to be with their families. There are also times when units may not be filled in apartment buildings. These are perfect times to perform work, sprucing them up before putting them back on the market for the next renter.

Extend The Asset Life Of Your Investments!

Why is preventive maintenance so important? It protects your investments, making them last longer so that you can continue profiting off them. By maintaining your facilities, you can avoid costly emergency repairs that can seriously burn a hole in your bottom line.

You should never skip out on preventive maintenance, and you should make sure to go with experienced professionals. Be sure reach out to us, and we will provide an estimate to keep your facilities in the best possible shape!  OpenWorks has a team of skilled service providers in HVAC, plumbing, pest control, and more so that your facilities are protected!