Why does construction handover data cost owners so much?

The number that should make an owner angry

Every asset in a building was specified, procured, installed and commissioned. Somebody wrote down what it was, where it went, what its warranty said and how often it needs servicing. That information existed, in full, on the day the building was handed over.

And then, in a great many cases, it did not arrive — or it arrived as four hundred PDFs in a folder structure nobody can navigate, which is the same thing wearing a suit. So the operator sends people out with a torch and a clipboard to find out what is in the plant rooms. NIST put the annual cost of that at roughly $4.8 billion for the US alone: not the cost of missing data, but the cost of an industry paying a second time to learn what data it already commissioned.

One caveat, said plainly: NIST’s study is from 2002. It remains the standard citation for this problem, which is itself part of the story.

Structured handover is the alternative

COBie is the standard format for delivering asset data — equipment lists, warranties, PM schedules, O&M documents — from construction into operations. The point is not the format. The point is that the data is captured at commissioning, while the people who installed the plant are still standing next to it, rather than reconstructed later by people who were not there.

Structured capture at handover costs a fraction of re-surveying an operating property. And it has to be specified as a deliverable in the contract, with acceptance criteria, or it will be produced in the last week of the job by whoever is left.

Why hotels and mixed-use feel it worst

Systems density plus FF&E volume. A hotel carries the plant load of a commercial building and the furniture, fixtures and equipment count of several hundred small dwellings, and it does so under a brand standard that will require the whole lot to be replaced on a cycle.

And the quiet loss is warranty. An asset that never made it onto the register carries a warranty nobody claims — and it expires without anyone knowing it existed. Nothing announces it. That is precisely what makes it expensive.

Terms

• As-Built Drawing