Building Maintenance Software: How Much Does It Cost & Best Tools For Property Managers

What Is Building Maintenance Software?

Building Maintenance Software is a digital tool used by property managers to plan, schedule, and track maintenance activities across buildings. That includes planned preventive maintenance (PPM) tasks, routine maintenance, and emergency or reactive repairs.

It provides facility managers, property landlords, and maintenance personnel with tools to assign engineers and technicians based on real-time data, create and assign maintenance work orders, and track the job progress of contractors and maintenance personnel.

While aligned with Facilities Management Software, Building Maintenance Software focused entirely on a property’s maintenance activities for ensuring a safe building environment for occupants. It is used in:

• Schools
• Commercial properties
• Offices
• Public buildings
• Apartments, flats and housing buildings
• Hospitals and healthcare facilities
• Hotels and rentals

How Much Does Building & Property Maintenance Software Cost?

The cost of Building Maintenance Software varies based on requirements, capabilities, and deployment. In a generic sense, building maintenance tools start at as little as £8.50 per month, per user like SnapFix and go up to as much as £1200 per month for a complex system designed for multiple properties, like Concerto or Planon (From £35,000 per annum).

For small operations, some companies offer free Building Maintenance Software solutions for a limited time before paying a monthly or yearly fee (also called free trials).

What Are the Top 7 Property and Building Maintenance Software Solutions?

Key Capabilities & Features of Building Maintenance Software

Building Maintenance Software tools combine all property maintenance data in one place. That includes work orders, asset registers, engineer availability, compliance requirements, and spare parts inventory. This brings about core capabilities that help to improve the day-to-day maintenance operations of a building.

• Improve workflow and communication between maintenance personnel and field workers
• Track job management and work order progress in real-time on a mobile app
• Log, prioritise, and assign jobs, from small reactive repairs to larger corrective tasks
• Create and track digital maintenance checklists or forms
• Generate building inspection reports automatically from completed forms and make them accessible in a shared mobile app or web portal
• Generate building inspection reports and access them in a shared mobile app
• Create and manage planned preventive maintenance (PPM) workflows and tasks
• Use a planned and shared calendar to assign workers
• Send and receive push notifications and alerts for when maintenance tasks are overdue or complete
• Capture every interaction against the job or asset record, so there is always a clear audit trail of what was requested, agreed, and completed

Why Property Managers Choose to Implement Building Maintenance Software

Building management protocols are essential for property owners. They allow buildings, equipment, and other assets to be kept in optimal working condition and help to plan building layouts, maximise space management, and prioritise occupant safety. Ensuring building maintenance tasks are properly tracked and managed is a major contributing factor in the upkeep of a property.

Building maintenance incorporates several hard and soft FM services. Soft FM services include grounds maintenance. Hard FM services make up maintenance tasks such as air conditioning/HVAC maintenance and energy maintenance management/tracking.

There are several types of building maintenance approaches. Some types provide time-saving and cost-effective benefits such as PPM and routine maintenance. Other types, such as reactive maintenance, have the opposite effect.

Whatever approach a building manager takes, implementing a building maintenance plan has several benefits:

• Saving on energy usage by incorporating sensor trackers and real-time analytics
• Minimising downtime of equipment that may impact occupant safety or productivity
• Reducing emergency repair costs through preventive maintenance plans

Types of Building Maintenance

Routine Building Maintenance

Routine maintenance follows a predetermined checklist encompassing daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly tasks. Although building maintenance predominantly surrounds hard FM tasks, routine maintenance includes a majority of soft FM tasks such as cleaning, waste management, refilling vending machines, and pest control.

Routine checks and inspections would also be performed to monitor building functions and appearance, highlighting any further maintenance that is required.

Preventive Building Maintenance

Preventive maintenance – or PPM in facilities management terms – is used to proactively track and manage maintenance activities to avoid unexpected building maintenance failures. As well as saving money, a preventative maintenance approach helps team members do their jobs more effectively and involves much less stress all around.

Inspecting water pipes regularly is an example of where it pays to plan ahead. A leaking pipe, left unchecked, can cost businesses 1,000 litres of water an hour, equating to £26,000 over a year.

Proactive maintenance gives a better understanding of when equipment, parts, and systems need to be repaired or replaced. Building managers can then plan for work to be undertaken at the least disruptive times and that the work is carried out cost-effectively.
For instance, if the power-assisted revolving door at the building’s entrance is coming to the end of its useful life cycle, a work order is created to replace it.

Part of preventive maintenance involves predictive testing and inspection. Predictive testing includes ultrasonic sound analysis to help spot leaks, infrared thermography scans to identify heat build-up in electrical equipment, oil analysis, and vibration analysis of parts.

Reactive Property Maintenance

Reactive maintenance is deployed in a bid to save time and money. It is a maintenance strategy that initiates maintenance only when maintenance is required.

However, by choosing a reactive approach to maintenance you may find that the budget you’ve set aside quickly becomes saturated. Although a reactive maintenance approach can suit smaller operations that rely less on asset uptime, it is typically a strategy that can prove costly.

• High Building Maintenance Costs: Having a reactive maintenance plan means assets and infrastructure aren’t regularly checked. Meaning wear, tear, and minor repairs aren’t caught and acted upon before they fail. Resulting in high emergency repair costs that aren’t budgeted for. Take roof maintenance for example. The roof is the most vulnerable part of a building, being subject to year-round weather conditions and high traffic if relying on tradespeople to carry out services that require roof access. A leaky roof can mean damage to valuable contents inside, not to mention structural damage elsewhere.
• Increased Equipment Downtime: In an office building, a roof in need of repair can cause chaos for workers. While an HVAC system breaking can result in the need to send staff home. Major repairs like these are costly to get fixed quickly and may cause significant downtime. Not to mention causing an unsafe and unproductive building environment for occupants. Without a proactive approach to maintenance, unplanned downtime of essential equipment is inevitable.
• Dealing With Stress and Backlog: Reactive maintenance work can cause stress for maintenance technicians who find themselves under pressure to get the problem resolved quickly. Additionally, a reactive approach can mean a backlog in other less-important maintenance jobs, causing annoyance and frustration elsewhere among the people who use the facility.