A survey of operation and maintenance budgetary practices for commercial buildings in Hong Kong - preliminary findings

Allocation of adequate resources for recurrent operation and maintenance (O&M) work is crucial to sustaining the performance of a building and hence its economic rent. Commercial building owners would desire to minimise O&M costs while striving to maximise rental income. This is, however, unachievable without proper budgeting and control of O&M work which is typically undertaken by a hybrid of in-house and outsourced resources. This paper reviews the budgeting principles and models in literature and reports the findings of a study investigating the budgeting and control practices through a series of face-to-face interviews with three different groups of O&M practitioners, namely those playing the role of building owner, building management company and contractor. The key pieces of information on which budgets are based, the budget estimation techniques, and the methods and processes used to control expenditure are analysed and discussed.