Taking on an estate: what to establish in the first 90 days

Taking on an estate — through a job move, a contract win, or an acquisition — means inheriting someone else's understanding of what is covered. That understanding is rarely written down in full, and the parts that are written down are rarely the parts that matter. The handover pack will tell you where the plant rooms are. It will not tell you that the lift maintenance contract lapsed in March and nobody noticed.

The first ninety days are when you can ask obvious questions without it reflecting on you. After that, anything you discover is something you missed. That makes the window worth using deliberately rather than spending it firefighting whatever arrives, which is what usually happens.

Days 1–30: find out what you actually have

You cannot maintain what you do not know exists, and the single most common inheritance problem is an asset register that describes the estate as it was understood some years ago. Assets get replaced without the register being updated, buildings get reconfigured, and plant gets decommissioned in place rather than removed.

The aim in the first month is not a perfect register. It is a verified one for the things that carry statutory obligations. Everything else can wait. That means physically confirming the existence, location and identity of the assets that attract inspection duties — lifting equipment, pressure systems, electrical installations, water systems, fire safety equipment, any local exhaust ventilation — rather than accepting the list you were handed. What a facilities asset register needs to hold covers the structure; the inheritance-specific advice is to treat every entry as unverified until someone has stood in front of it.

Expect to find three categories of surprise: assets that exist and are not on the register, assets on the register that no longer exist, and assets that exist in a different form from the one recorded, which is the most dangerous because the inspection regime attached to them may be wrong.

Days 1–30, in parallel: establish what is in date

Running alongside the asset verification is the question of currency. For each statutory obligation, three facts matter: when was the last inspection or test, when is the next due, and where is the certificate. A surprising number of estates can answer two of those three.

The missing certificate is the one that tends to be dismissed as administrative. It is not. If an inspection happened and the report cannot be produced, you are in the same evidential position as if it had not happened, and the person who will be asked is you. Which statutory inspections apply and at what cadence is the reference point, with the relevant regulator's own current guidance as the authority on frequency and scope.

Build this as a single list with a status against every item: in date with certificate held, in date with certificate missing, overdue, or unknown. The fourth category is the important one and it should not be allowed to quietly merge into the first.

Days 30–60: find out who is doing the work and whether they should be

An inherited estate comes with inherited contractors, and inherited contractors come with arrangements that may never have been formally reviewed. The questions are straightforward and frequently unanswered: is there a current contract, what does it actually cover, when does it end, is their insurance current, and are their accreditations and competence appropriate to the work they are doing.

The uncomfortable discovery here is usually the long-standing contractor who has been attending for years on the basis of a relationship rather than a document. They may be excellent. The absence of a current contract and current evidence of competence is still a problem, and it is a problem you now own. What a contractor register needs to track sets out the fields; the first-ninety-days version is simply to establish which contractors are attending your estate at all, which is harder than it sounds on a portfolio where site teams arrange their own work.

It is also worth asking what each contractor is not doing. Scope gaps between contracts are a classic inheritance problem — two maintenance contracts that each assume the other covers a particular system, with the result that nobody has looked at it for three years.

Days 60–90: triage, then commit to dates

By this point you will have a list of gaps that is longer than your budget and longer than your calendar. The temptation is to present it as a risk register and wait for a decision. That rarely produces one.

A more useful structure is three tiers. Things that are both overdue and high consequence get a date and a cost, now. Things that are overdue and lower consequence get a programmed date within the year. Things that are merely undocumented — where the work has probably been done but the evidence is missing — get rolled into the next cycle, on the basis that the next inspection will produce a certificate and reset the position.

That third tier is where judgement is needed and where criticality rating earns its place. Not every asset justifies the same urgency, and treating them all identically is how a genuinely urgent item ends up queued behind forty trivial ones.

Write down what you inherited, and date it

This is the step that is almost always skipped and the one that protects you. At the end of the ninety days, record the position as you found it: what was in date, what was not, what could not be established, and what you have programmed. Date it, and share it with whoever you report to.

The reason is simple. If something surfaces in eighteen months that originates from before your arrival, the difference between a documented inherited position and a verbal recollection is substantial. It also converts your first three months from an unmeasured settling-in period into a deliverable, which is a materially better conversation to have at your first review.

If you are on the other side of this — leaving an estate rather than arriving at one — the same list read backwards is a good handover. What a departing facilities manager should hand over covers that case, and the honest version includes the things that are not right, which is the part that tends to go missing.

What good looks like at day 90

• –A verified asset register for everything carrying a statutory obligation — verified physically, not inherited on trust.
• –A single compliance position with four statuses, including an explicit 'unknown' that has not been allowed to blend into 'fine'.
• –A list of every contractor attending the estate, with contract, insurance and competence evidence current or flagged.
• –Known scope gaps between contracts identified and assigned.
• –A three-tier remediation plan with dates and costs on the top tier.
• –A dated written record of the position as inherited, shared upward.

Ninety days is not long enough to fix an estate. It is long enough to know what you are dealing with, which is the only basis on which the fixing can be sensibly planned — and it is a great deal better than finding out from an inspector.