The building is empty for eight hours, and that is the whole schedule
Almost everything on this page is a consequence of one fact: an office building with more than one tenant has no quiet period during the working day. There is no term break, no closing night, no seasonal lull.
So the maintenance window is the evening and the early morning, and the planning problem is fitting the work into it. That shapes janitorial, most lighting work, carpet and floor care, painting, and anything electrical needing a circuit down.
It also means that work needing a longer shutdown has to be planned around a weekend well in advance, rather than squeezed into a weeknight and left half-finished at 6 AM.
Comfort complaints are a relationship problem wearing a technical costume
The single most common call from an office building is that someone is too hot or too cold. The technical cause is usually minor - a control setting, an unbalanced zone, a diffuser blowing onto a desk, a sensor in the wrong place.
The cost is not minor, because it is the thing tenants raise at renewal. A building with a reputation for being uncomfortable loses tenants over a problem that was, in engineering terms, small.
What works is agreeing the triage order before the season starts. No heat in January outranks a warm corner office. A whole floor outranks one room. Written down in advance, this is uncontroversial. Decided in the moment, it looks like favouritism.
Water comes from above the ceiling, not through the roof
Offices generate a specific and repeating fault: a stain appears on a ceiling tile, the tile is replaced, and the stain comes back.
The cause is nearly always a condensate drain on an above-ceiling air handling unit. The drain blocks with biological growth, the pan overflows, and the water finds the tile. It is cheap to clear and it is on the checklist of a scheduled HVAC visit, which is why buildings on a maintenance schedule mostly do not have this problem and buildings without one have it every year.
What tenants see is a leasing cost
There is a line inside every office building that separates the parts a prospective tenant walks through from the parts they do not.
The lobby, the lifts, the corridors, the restrooms and the glass sit on the visible side, and work there is not really maintenance spend - it is leasing spend. Worn entrance matting, a scuffed lift lobby, a corridor with mismatched paint from old repairs and a restroom that smells faintly of drain are all read as evidence about the building’s management, fairly or not.
That is why we keep a colour and product specification for painted areas: a year later, a touch-up after a repair either matches or it announces itself from across the lobby.
Common areas versus demised space
Most disputes about who pays for what in an office building come down to the lease, and the useful thing is to establish the line before there is a leak rather than during one.
We work for either side. Landlords more often for base building services, common areas and plant; tenants more often for their own fit-out, supplementary cooling and internal repairs. The only thing that matters operationally is knowing who is instructing, because that determines who gets the report and who gets the invoice.