Across three continents, Solutions In Engineering (SIE) strongly advocates for owners of Unit Titles and Incorporated Schemes to make maintenance planning a priority. The very future of your unit, your asset, your building, rests on how well you plan and fund today for the maintenance of tomorrow.
Not only are you preserving the largest asset you own, but you will actually be saving yourself and your fellow owner's money in the long run, because when we miss proactive maintenance timelines, reactive maintenance always ends up costing more, threatening the financial future of the owners within the scheme.
SIE assisted Parliament back in 2010 to draft legislation around Long-Term Maintenance Plans (LTMPs), and the purpose behind these reports with our vast experience in building life-cycles and forecasting, having completed more than 1.7 million reports.
Around the world, governments have realised that if Unit Titles Schemes are not forced (through legislation) to budget future maintenance, owners neglect to put away funds for repairs and replacement expenses, and instead of dealing with the large replacement items, choose to sell out instead.
What this causes is a downward spiral as existing owners sell out, new owners leverage everything to buy in and then get hit with hundreds of thousands in “urgent” remedial maintenance like concrete cancer or waterproofing issues. This spiral ultimately leads to buildings becoming derelict and eventually towns and suburbs becoming undesirable.
It is this societal concept that has seen the importance placed on maintenance planning in Unit Titled Schemes across the globe, with governments tightening legislation to ensure few buildings can fall into disrepair without someone being liable, which in most cases, are the owners. It is for this reason it is best to get the LTMP reviewed professionally every three years, ensuring experts are reviewing the state of your building, its building elements, and ensuring your current funding trend is sufficient to meet expenses.
It is now well appreciated that a lack of proactive maintenance leads to numerous building defects and consequently requires more trades to rectify and repair the building. A fantastic example, relevant to nearly every body corporate, is painting. If not done when recommended by an expert in line with your LTMP, painting (the essential waterproofing envelope of your building) will deteriorate, allowing water to penetrate into the superstructure of the building. In saline heavy environments with lots of salt in the air, this is exacerbated even further, as salt acts as a conduit for the moisture. When water gets into the concrete and the Reinforcing Bars within, concrete cancer/spalling begins.
And just like that, a lack of proactive maintenance will jeopardise the structural integrity of the building and balloon the cost of repair. What would be a simple painting job with one qualified trade can morph into a huge project involving builders, structural engineers, and council certifiers in addition to the original painter. Neglecting to carry out a proactive maintenance cost of $100k can turn into a reactive maintenance cost of half a million dollars or more.
A body corporate chairperson once asked me, “But what do I tell my committee when we currently have so many remedial projects and cannot afford to fund a new LTMP?” My response was, “You can tell them the lack of planning they did five and ten years ago is the reason they currently have so much remedial work. What’s important now is ensuring that in five to ten years they do not have history repeat itself.”
Allowing a committee to prepare and complete their own LTMP is a recipe for disaster. A committee looking to spend no money with no real idea on building material life cycles and an “it looks fine to me” attitude is not a building any homeowner should be comfortable living in.
Dakota Panetta National Business Development Manager Solutions in Engineering
