By Gary E. Wilson, President & Designated Broker, Wilson Management, Inc.
Commercial building maintenance divides into two activities with opposite economics: preventing failures, which is cheap and schedulable, and responding to them, which is expensive and disruptive to tenants.
Every building does both. The ratio between them is a management choice rather than a property characteristic, and in the Puget Sound climate the choice is unusually consequential — because most of what fails here fails through water, and water in an occupied commercial building damages tenant property rather than just the building.
This is a seasonal schedule built for this region.
Late summer to early autumn — the critical window
Everything done here prevents a winter problem. This is the highest-value maintenance period of the year.
- Roof inspection — seams, flashings, penetrations, and the condition of any coating. Membrane and low-slope roofs fail at details, not in the open field
- Roof drains, scuppers and gutters cleared, and downspouts discharging away from the building
- Envelope inspection — sealants, glazing perimeters, cladding joints, and flashings
- Site drainage — catch basins cleared, no ponding against the building
- HVAC changeover service before the heating season, with controls verified against actual conditions
- Heating plant serviced — boilers, rooftop units, heat pumps
- Exterior lighting checked ahead of the dark months, all failed fixtures replaced
- Deck, balcony and walkway surfaces inspected where present
- Vegetation cut back from the building and away from drainage
Through the wet season
Spring
Summer
Ongoing, year-round
Why this climate is different
Maintenance schedules written for other regions transfer badly here, because the failure modes are specific.
The dominant one is sustained damp rather than extremes. This region does not deliver the hard freezes or the summer heat that destroy building components elsewhere. It delivers months of persistent, wind-driven rain at temperatures that never fully dry anything.
Three consequences follow.
Water travels horizontally. Wind-driven rain is pushed against walls and into any gap in the envelope. A building watertight against vertical rain can admit water for months here, and the entry point is frequently nowhere near where the leak appears inside.
Organic growth is constant. Moss on roofs holds water against the covering and lifts edges. Left alone it takes years off a roof with decades remaining.
Nothing dries between events. A minor leak in a drier climate is a stain that dries. Here it stays damp, which turns a maintenance item into a mould question inside a tenant's space.
The three items that return the most
If a building does only three things from this list:
Clear the roof drains and gutters before the wet season. Blocked drainage is the origin of most commercial roof failures, and clearing it is among the cheapest work available.
Service the HVAC before the season, both ways. It is the largest controllable operating cost and the leading source of tenant complaints, so the same attention serves the budget and the relationship at once.
Seal envelope penetrations and check sealant condition. Sealant has a finite life that nobody tracks unless someone decides to, and its failure produces interior damage relatively quickly here.
Working around tenants
Everything on this schedule happens in a building people are trying to work in, and the disruption lands on tenants at their most productive hours. How that is handled affects renewals more than the maintenance itself does.
Notify specifically, not vaguely. A tenant told that water will be off between 6am and 8am on Tuesday plans around it. The same tenant discovering it at 9am has a genuine grievance, and the grievance attaches to the landlord.
Schedule disruptive work around operations. Noisy work, anything affecting access, and anything interrupting building systems belongs outside core hours where the work allows it.
Give advance warning for system interruptions. Sprinkler isolation, power shutdowns and alarm testing can stop a tenant working entirely, and some tenants — medical, laboratory, data — cannot absorb an unplanned interruption at all. Knowing which of your tenants those are, before scheduling anything, is basic and frequently skipped.
Protect common areas. The routes contractors travel are the routes tenants and their visitors use.
Close the loop. Telling a tenant the work is complete, and what was done, converts an inconvenience into evidence the building is being looked after.
The pattern worth avoiding is a building permanently under works. A program concentrated into a defined period is tolerated; the same total work spread indefinitely across every month makes the building feel like a construction site to everyone in it.
What owners should receive
Maintenance reporting is worth more than a list of completed jobs, because the useful information is in the pattern rather than the individual item.
Work completed, itemised by system, so spend can be read as a trend rather than as a series of surprises.
Outstanding items with their status, so nothing sits unresolved because everyone assumed someone else was handling it.
Preventive tasks against schedule, which is the number that reveals whether a program is actually running. A schedule with a completion rate nobody tracks is an intention.
Items being watched, with expected timing. This is the bridge into capital planning — a rooftop unit noted as needing more attention each season is not a maintenance item, it is a budget line with a horizon.
Recoverable versus non-recoverable spend, separated at the point of entry rather than reconstructed at year end.
That last split does real work. A landlord who cannot see the split until reconciliation season has no way of knowing through the year whether the recovery position is what it should be.
Reactive maintenance is information
Service calls are not just costs. Read as a pattern, they are the best capital planning input a building has.
Three calls to the same rooftop unit in a season is not three incidents. It is one asset telling you it is finished, and treating it as three separate repairs is how buildings end up replacing equipment in an emergency in August at whatever price is available.
That is why service requests should be recorded with location, date and outcome — not for administration, but because the history is what distinguishes an aging asset from bad luck.
Where recoverability comes in
In a building where operating expenses are recovered from tenants, maintenance spending is partly the tenants' money, which makes classification a live question rather than an accounting detail.
Repairs are generally recoverable operating expenses. Replacements generally are not, except where a lease permits amortised recovery. Deciding that at the point of spend rather than at reconciliation keeps the reconciliation defensible and stops a landlord either forgoing recovery it is entitled to or claiming recovery it is not.
See CAM Reconciliation for how that plays out, and CAM charges explained for the underlying structures.
Where to go next
Our Commercial Building Maintenance page covers how we run these programs, Vendor Management covers sourcing and supervising the trades, and Asset Planning covers what happens when maintenance becomes capital.
For the full service, see Commercial Property Management, or contact us to discuss your building.
About the author
Gary E. Wilson is the President and Designated Broker of Wilson Management, Inc., which he has led in serving property owners across Bellevue and the Greater Seattle area since 1982. With more than 40 years of hands-on experience, Gary helps owners protect and maximize the value of single-family, multi-family, and commercial properties.
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