If you’ve bought a property for your new business and are unsure of what might go into taking care of the buildings on the property, listen up. One of the best things you can do is have the buildings inspected on a regular basis, followed up by any reactive and preventive maintenance needed to ensure everything in the building remains in working condition.

Why Regular Building Inspections Are Essential

Some maintenance is rather obvious to anyone who’s spent time in a building; most people know that air conditioner filters need to be changed periodically, for example. But other maintenance issues are hidden, and you don’t know they’re there until they cause a problem. That’s why regular building inspections are so critical; without them, you could miss brewing problems regarding structural damage, code compliance, and pest infestations.

Preventive Maintenance Saves You Money and Trouble

You know that saying, “Don’t fix it if it ain’t broke?” Some people apply that to everything, including things that need maintenance in order not to break down further. Sometimes preventive maintenance looks like repair, with parts changed or adjusted. You’re not fixing something that isn’t broken; you’re giving things a tune-up so that they don’t break.

When you perform preventive maintenance, you give equipment the ability to work as it should. You remove parts that appear not to be doing too well even though they are still working, you clean or replace filters, you tighten bolts that may have loosened a bit due to vibration, and more. If you left all of these alone, then the equipment these parts are in could break down completely, leading to more expensive repairs. The downtime could also affect your company’s productivity. For example, if you have to stop an assembly line because it broke, all the time the assembly line was shut down, it could reduce the number of items your company could produce. That could lead to lower profits. By inspecting and doing preventive maintenance, you avoid the problem of halted productivity.

Sometimes you end up having to do reactive maintenance anyway. Reactive maintenance is that which you do in response to something failing or breaking. However, regular building inspections should help keep any reactive maintenance relatively simple. If you catch a problem when it’s still small, you can avoid having to do emergency repairs.

Don’t Forget Your Property Value

If nothing else, a building that you don’t maintain proactively and that you don’t put through regular inspections can fall in value. Even if everything that goes wrong is easily fixed, the building becomes one that has a long record of repairs. That could lead potential buyers (if you ever put the building up for sale) to wonder if there could be hidden problems that would appear later on after they bought the building. Inspecting and regularly performing preventive maintenance keeps the building in much better shape and shows that you’ve taken good care of the place.

How to Set up a Maintenance Schedule

So, now that you know that regular building inspections and maintenance are critical to the functioning of the building and the value of the property, how do you set up a schedule? Start by identifying the items that routinely need attention; those should be inspected more frequently, and health and safety issues should be addressed, such as ensuring stairwells stay in good shape. Then start looking at what you have; make an inventory list of all equipment and fixtures, including lights. Check manufacturer recommendations for maintenance and order the items according to whether they need to be inspected or maintained daily, weekly, monthly, etc. It helps if you contact a building inspection contractor who can give you more advice as well as set up times to give the building a full inspection.

KH Construction Management Corp can help you with structural repair in Bucks County, PA, plus other general contractor needs in Bensalem PA. Don’t ignore your building and property just because nothing’s gone wrong yet. Get the property inspected and call in a contractor if you find issues that need repair.