"We'll fix it when it breaks."
It sounds practical. Sensible, even. Why spend money on maintenance when everything's working fine?
Until you realise that a $200 preventative service just became a $15,000 emergency replacement — at 2am on a Sunday, with a call-out fee that makes your eyes water.
Reactive building management is the default mode for most strata buildings in Australia. Something breaks, someone calls, it gets fixed. Repeat. It feels efficient because you're only spending money when you absolutely have to.
But when you actually add up the costs — the real costs — reactive management is almost always more expensive than doing things properly in the first place.
Reactive management doesn't just cost more in dollar terms. It costs more in stress, in time, in resident complaints, and in the slow degradation of your building's value. Here's where the money actually goes:
When something fails outside business hours — and it always seems to — you're paying premium rates. After-hours call-outs typically cost two to three times the standard rate. A lift breakdown on a Friday night, a burst pipe at midnight, a failed fire panel on a public holiday. These aren't rare events. They're the predictable consequence of not maintaining equipment properly.
The same repair that costs $400 during business hours costs $1,200 at 11pm. And when it's urgent, you don't have time to get competitive quotes. You pay whatever the available contractor charges.
Every piece of mechanical equipment in your building has a design life. Lifts, pumps, HVAC systems, fire panels — they're all engineered to last a certain number of years under normal operating conditions with proper maintenance.
Skip the maintenance, and that design life shrinks. A lift that should last 25 years might need major refurbishment at 15. A pump that should run for a decade might burn out in five. You're not saving money by deferring maintenance — you're borrowing it from the future, with interest.
Building systems don't exist in isolation. They're interconnected. A failed pump doesn't just mean no water pressure — it means potential damage to the hot water system, which affects the heating, which leads to resident complaints, which consumes committee time.
Small problems that aren't addressed become medium problems. Medium problems become major failures. And major failures create secondary damage that wouldn't have happened if someone had caught the issue early.
A $50 seal replacement ignored becomes a $500 leak. A $500 leak ignored becomes a $5,000 water damage remediation. This isn't hypothetical — it's the pattern I see repeated in building after building.
Insurers aren't stupid. Buildings with poor maintenance histories, frequent claims, and reactive management approaches are higher risk — and they're priced accordingly. Every emergency claim goes on your record. Every incident that could have been prevented through proper maintenance is a data point that affects your premiums.
Over time, the difference in insurance costs between a well-maintained building and a reactive one can be substantial. It's a hidden cost that most committees never connect back to their management approach.
Proactive management isn't about spending more money. It's about spending money more intelligently — preventing problems rather than responding to them, and maintaining assets rather than replacing them prematurely.
Here's what it looks like in practice:
Every piece of critical equipment has a maintenance schedule based on manufacturer recommendations and industry best practice. Lifts get serviced monthly. Pumps get inspected quarterly. Fire systems get tested according to Australian Standards. Nothing waits until it fails.
This isn't gold-plating — it's the baseline for protecting your assets. The maintenance schedule exists because that's what's required to keep equipment running reliably for its full design life.
Proactive managers know how old every major asset is, what condition it's in, and when it's likely to need replacement. They're not surprised when the original lift motor reaches end of life — they've been planning for it for years, building the capital reserve, getting quotes in advance.
Reactive managers get blindsided. "The lift needs a $400,000 refurbishment and we don't have the funds" is a crisis. With lifecycle planning, it's just the next line item in a 10-year capital works plan.
You can't prevent problems you don't know about. Proactive management means regular walkthroughs, condition assessments, and reporting that identifies issues while they're still small. That hairline crack in the basement. That slight vibration in the pump. That door seal that's starting to degrade.
These observations don't happen by accident. They require someone who knows what to look for, who's paying attention, and who has the systems to track and follow up on what they find.
Modern buildings have monitoring capabilities that most committees don't even know about. Lift systems can flag developing faults before they cause breakdowns. BMS systems can identify HVAC inefficiencies before they become failures. Water meters can detect leaks before they become floods.
A proactive building manager uses these tools. They're checking the alerts, responding to early warnings, and addressing issues during business hours — not waiting for the 2am phone call.
Let's make this concrete with two examples I see regularly:
A well-maintained lift with proper monthly servicing, timely part replacements, and regular modernisation can run for 25-30 years before needing major refurbishment. A poorly maintained lift — one where services are skipped, minor issues are ignored, and parts are run to failure — might need that same refurbishment at 15-18 years.
The difference in maintenance costs over that period might be $30,000-50,000. The difference in replacement timing could save $300,000-500,000 in capital expenditure. That's a 10:1 return on maintenance investment.
Catching waterproofing failure early — when it's a small area of membrane degradation — might cost $5,000-10,000 to repair. Ignoring it until water is coming through ceilings means full membrane replacement, concrete remediation, and internal repairs. That's $150,000-300,000 or more, depending on the extent of the damage.
The buildings that catch these issues early are the ones with proactive managers doing regular roof inspections, checking for ponding water, and monitoring known problem areas.
Reactive management feels cheaper because you're not spending money today. But you're accumulating a maintenance debt that compounds over time. Every deferred service, every ignored warning sign, every "we'll deal with it next year" decision adds to the bill.
Eventually, that bill comes due. And when it does, it's always larger than it would have been if someone had addressed the issues when they were small.
The question isn't whether you can afford proactive management. It's whether you can afford not to have it.
Where are reactive costs hiding in your building?
Take the free Building Management Scorecard to identify areas where proactive management could be saving you money — and preventing the next emergency call-out.
Dino Biordi
Founder & Managing Director, LUNA Management
25+ years in construction | NSW ABMA Independent Review Panel
A Building Manager oversees the safety, security and maintenance of designated properties and ensures that these properties comply with all applicable regulations. A Building Manager is also known as a Facilities Manager, Caretaker or Resident Manager. They are assisting the Owners Corporation with managing the common property, controlling the use of the common property by non-residents, arranging the maintenance and repair of common property.
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