The Whitestone Building Maintenance and Repair Cost Reference 2005-2006

The reference is intended for two audiences. The first group has a common need to know the long-term M&R costs of specific buildings. This group consists of analysts, developers, architects, bankers, investors, and others who must account for M&R costs that, over a 50-year building lifetime, can easily exceed the costs of construction. Forecasts of these costs are critical for justifying the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars—even a rudimentary business plan or benefit/cost study must recognize M&R—yet such forecasts are usually based on ad hoc approximation or ill-defined rules of thumb. To meet this need, we provide detailed estimates of long-term M&R requirements for selected building models.

The second audience consists of facility managers and all those responsible for estimating and justifying facility maintenance budgets. Acutely aware of immediate needs, this group often does not put funding requests in a larger context: How much does funding need to rise just to keep up with inflation? What is the appropriate funding level for a facility with an inventory of particular building types? Such information provides a benchmark, a point of reference, for demonstrating M&R requirements. For this purpose, we provide national and local M&R indexes, and forecasts of in-house and contract maintenance costs for major U.S. metropolitan areas. 10th Annual Edition (2005-2006).