Planned versus reactive maintenance: where the money actually goes

The apparent logic of reactive

Reactive maintenance looks cheaper. You pay when something breaks. There is no standing contract, no schedule, no commitment. For a small portfolio it can genuinely be the right answer.

The problem is that the invoice is not where the cost sits.

The four costs that do not appear on an invoice

Administration. A reactive job typically involves: a report from a tenant or a site, a call or email to a contractor, a wait, a quote, an approval, a scheduling conversation, an access arrangement, an attendance, and a follow-up on the paperwork. For a £180 repair, that can easily be an hour of a property manager's time. Multiply that across a portfolio and the administration is a larger number than the works.

Escalation. Almost every reactive job was preventable earlier and cheaper. A blocked gutter becomes water ingress becomes damp becomes replastering and redecoration. A failing valve becomes an escape of water becomes an insurance claim and a ceiling. The reactive invoice is for the escalated version.

Premium pricing. Urgent attendance costs more than scheduled attendance, and it always will. So does a single visit to a single property compared with a batched visit clearing eight jobs.

Compliance drift. Anything statutory that is run reactively will eventually lapse, because nothing triggers it until someone notices it has expired. Gas records, EICRs, fire alarm servicing and emergency lighting duration tests are the usual casualties.

What should be planned

The test is simple: is it predictable?

• Anything statutory — gas, electrical, fire, water. These have fixed intervals and known expiry dates.
• Anything seasonal — gutter and gully clearance before winter, heating checks before the cold, grounds maintenance through the growing season.
• Anything with a known service life — boiler components, emergency lighting batteries, door closers, roof coverings.
• Anything cyclical — communal redecoration, flooring in high-traffic areas, external decoration.

What should stay reactive

• Genuine failures and accidents. No schedule prevents a burst pipe or a break-in.
• Tenant-caused damage.
• Anything where the cost of planned inspection exceeds the cost of the occasional failure — which is a real category, and worth being honest about rather than putting everything on a schedule.

The middle ground most portfolios miss

Batched small works. The single biggest saving available to most managed portfolios is not a planned maintenance contract — it is holding non-urgent small jobs and clearing them in one visit. Twenty individual attendances become two, and the administration collapses with them.

Condition surveys feeding a forward plan. You cannot plan what you have not surveyed. A costed forward maintenance plan turns "the roof will need doing at some point" into a line in a budget three years out, which is the difference between a planned spend and an emergency one.

How to move a portfolio across

Not all at once. In practice:

1. Establish the compliance position first. Find out what has lapsed. It is usually worse than expected, and it is the only part with a legal deadline attached.
2. Put statutory servicing on a calendar with expiry tracking.
3. Add the seasonal work — it is predictable, cheap to schedule, and prevents the most expensive reactive failures.
4. Start batching small works.
5. Commission condition surveys on the assets with the largest replacement cost — roofs, plant, electrical distribution — and build a forward plan.

Reactive capability still matters throughout. The objective is not to eliminate reactive work; it is to stop paying reactive prices for predictable work.