Why knowing a building matters as much as fixing it

Take a blocked drain in a basement plant room. An engineer who has never been to the building has to start from scratch. He has to find out which pipe run feeds which stack, where the isolation valve is, whether this basement floods in heavy rain and whether the flat above has had problems before.

He'll work it out eventually, because that's the job. But while he's working it out, the fault is still there, and every assumption he makes along the way is a chance to get it wrong.

An engineer who knows the building doesn't start from scratch. He knows the drain has blocked twice before, both times after heavy rain, and both times because of the same badly graded section of pipe outside the bin store. He knows which resident to warn before he starts, because her kitchen backs onto that stack. He also knows that clearing the blockage won't solve anything unless someone deals with the pipe run itself, and he has already raised that with the managing agent twice.

He finishes the job in a fraction of the time, and he's more likely to have done the right job.

What the job sheet doesn't show

This kind of knowledge is the hardest thing to measure. It's also the easiest to lose when a contract changes hands or a rota moves staff between sites. On paper, a team that knows a building and a team that doesn't can have the same response times and similar-looking job sheets.

The difference is judgement. It means knowing where the water is actually coming from, not only where the fault was reported. It means knowing which resident needs extra notice. It means noticing that a lift motor has been getting louder for three months, instead of treating the latest report as a one-off.

That knowledge builds up the way local knowledge always does, with the same people going back to the same building over years. It shows up as a sense that a plant room fault is worse than it sounds, because the same fault escalated quickly three winters ago. It shows up as a decision to replace a part before it fails, because the engineer has seen others like it fail in the same way.

None of this is written in a manual. It stays with the person who keeps coming back.

"A contractor with excellent average response times but a rotating workforce is, in effect, sending a stranger to every job."

A harder thing to put in a tender

For managing agents choosing a maintenance provider, familiarity with a building is harder to write into a tender document than response times or price, but it may matter more. A provider whose engineers stay with the same buildings for years gives up some flexibility in return for something buildings need just as much: memory.

Fixing faults is the visible side of maintenance. Knowing a building well enough to see a fault coming, or to judge how serious it is, is what keeps a block running properly instead of just patched up. These are different skills, and a building is best served when one person has both.

By Ionut Marin, Managing Director