Property Maintenance : Concepts and determinants
Introduction Strategic property management aims at balancing the question of how the needed space is to be secured, maintained, increased or disposed of in a cost effective manner under a mixture of decisions and actions. In recent years, the interest in building maintenance has increased as more and more of the housing stock built after the Second World War is in need of major renovation. For example, approximately 1 million dwellings were constructed in Sweden in the period 1960-1970. Currently there is growing concern about the expected huge cost of maintaining this aging housing stock especially in the portfolio under municipal ownership. Private housing companies have been shown to report lower maintenance costs than those in the public sector but which are the factors that can explain the apparent differences? During the last decade there has also been a growing trend of governments diversifying themselves of their properties and/or outsourcing the property management. A question of interest is whether it is advantageous to do so and if the maintenance management differs substantially between the government sector and the industrial sector which is seen as business oriented and with a production centred maintenance strategy. In a number of industries there has been a paradigm shift in maintenance whereby the focus is no longer only on availability but reliability and cost effectiveness. New maintenance strategies and policies such as reliability centred maintenance have seen the light of day though without winning ground within property management. Shouldn't building maintenance be handled in the same way? This licentiate thesis focuses on the strategic management of housing properties under public and private ownership as well as the management of special purpose properties in the government and industrial sectors in relation to the ongoing discussion about neglected maintenance. The purpose is to contribute to the process of cost efficient and effective maintenance both in the housing sector and in the ...