Guidance for people running buildings.
Practical writing on planned maintenance, statutory inspections and asset compliance, from the team building FacilityOptix.
The Christmas shutdown is when buildings fail
Heating off, nobody in, and a hard frost. Most of the damage an estate takes over winter happens in the fortnight when the fewest people are there to notice it.
Read the article →Martyn's Law: working out which of your buildings is in scope
The duty attaches to premises, and the threshold is a headcount including staff. On a mixed estate that is a question nobody currently has an answer to — and the answer decides whether a building needs procedures or a documented, submitted assessment.
MEES for commercial buildings: the duty stopped waiting for a tenancy event
Since April 2023 the minimum EPC E requirement applies to all privately rented non-domestic property, not just to new and renewed tenancies. That turned an occasional letting question into a continuous estate obligation with a register behind it.
The duty to manage asbestos: what it means on a live estate
Most buildings built before 2000 contain asbestos somewhere, and the duty to manage it falls on whoever maintains the fabric. The failures are rarely about removal — they are about a register nobody consulted before drilling.
Taking on an estate: what to establish in the first 90 days
Inheriting a portfolio means inheriting someone else's assumptions about what is covered. A structured way to find out what you have, what is actually in date, and which of the gaps are urgent — before the first inspection lands.
BMS integration vs facilities management software: what's the difference
These two categories get conflated often enough that it's worth being explicit: one manages live plant behaviour, the other manages the people and paperwork around it.
Rolling out new facilities software without a stalled implementation
Most failed software rollouts aren't caused by the software. They're caused by an implementation that lost momentum somewhere between the contract and actual daily use.
Migrating facilities data to a new system without losing history
The biggest risk in a software switch isn't choosing the wrong platform — it's arriving on the right one with an asset register that's quietly lost its history along the way.
What a facilities compliance platform should include out of the box
A lot of what gets sold as an add-on is, functionally, table stakes for a facilities team with any statutory obligations at all. Here's what shouldn't need an upsell.