Irrespective of the building’s age, it is often a great idea to have an exact picture of the situation they are in and how well they are operating. Else, the building may have to undergo several massive repairs involving headaches hiding right in front of you. It is where building condition assessment can help a lot.
Therefore, here we bring all the things you would like to understand about facility condition assessments and their importance!
What Do You Understand by Building Condition Assessment?
It is considered the process of measuring your infrastructure and buildings’ functional performances and physical conditions.
This assessment aims to determine whether the buildings are appropriate or suitable for their intended functions. You can easily make some informed decisions regarding the maintenance, replacement, and renewal of the buildings on their own along with the infrastructure systems, for instance, heating and cooling and the elements involved in this system.
You can mainly conduct these assessments by undergoing walk-through inspections and mathematical modelling before collating the data using CMMS software. You can go through various factors, including the age of the building, design, the materials used in the construction, and exploring the main cause of the deterioration. You can produce a report of the facility condition assessment reports, including the record for the findings and capital planning generally over a decade for every facility.
Importance of Building Condition Assessment
Building or property condition assessments are mainly prepared for the owners and the managers of the commercial buildings, along with the real estate profiles. It can aid in optimizing and maintaining the physical conditions of their assets, prioritizing their resources, and developing capital budgets.
It is a great source of evidence to aid in arguing your case for restoring, replacing, and maintaining defective assets with the higher-ups. They will also help in prioritizing your projects for targeting capital investments, increasing the efficiency of the facility’s operations, and reducing the risks involved with downtime.
Best Practices for Building Condition Assessment
The below-mentioned are the five steps involved in the process of building condition assessment:
Step 1: Finishing the Site Inspection
Your initial job is to place a team in its place to assess each part of the building and get a comprehensive understanding of the systems, assets, and components. It is a great team, including the potential architects, a structural engineer, a mechanical engineer, and the cost estimator. The team needs clarification regarding the project’s scope, and you should offer the flexibility to bring up their ideas for overcoming the main challenges of this project.
Step 2: Collecting the Assessed Data
All data that you have collected should be reviewed and stored safely. It includes the drawings, contact information, digital pictures, and documentation. The team of inspectors would conduct interviews with building staff and operators to understand the conditions and challenges they are encountering.
These findings play the most important role in creating the final property condition assessment report vital for storing them in a single place. There is software to aid you in creating a unified, single, and robust storage solution by placing the relevant data in your hand.
Step 3: Prepare the Assessment Report
The building condition assessment report consists of a detailed write-up of the findings from the assessment, including the detailed analysis of the system of the building, maintenance priorities, and a summary. It includes the summaries of the expenditure for years 1, 5, and 10, although you will tailor the timeline to meet the requirements. It is worth writing about the executive summary, including the pertinent information in the form of a headline.
Step 4: Analyzing the Report
The next job will be to analyze the reports to ensure every finding is accounted for with the maintenance plans and capital expenditures. It is worth asking your peers to review the report to check the reliability of the data and ensure you consider every requirement and loophole.
Step 5: Presenting the Report to Decision-makers
The utmost focus for every facility condition assessment is on assisting your company in informing the decisions about the facilities and determining the effective manner of spending your budget. The report is then presented to the senior managers is the initial step included in this process. It is mainly the facility manager’s job to place a plan in place and offer the tech the tools they require for working.
Concluding Thoughts
The building condition assessment would aid in keeping your buildings in the best state of repair. You need to determine the system that has to work when it allows you to reduce the downtime throughout the life of the assets. You can make the most economical use of the team for maintenance as your engineers are working based on schedules instead of getting the reactive work done for fighting the fires.
