Building maintenance is a major activity in most countries. Any reduction in resources applied to building maintenance will have a visible effect on the economy.

Few years ago, a rapid growth of housing construction clearly appears as a part of the country development. The number of modern houses increases and more houses are being constructed. As a result, more maintenance work is required in order to cope with this type of construction.

Due to the growth of housing with the lack of building Standards, more maintenance, rehabilitation, and renovation work have become necessary to ensure the serviceability and safety of the constructed houses. In addition, the existing houses need to be sustained as long as possible. Therefore, ways must be found to reduce the maintenance cost works due to ageing of the buildings while keeping the same quality.

Building maintenance is seriously neglected area of research and study. Few schools of architecture or building include it in their curriculum and only recently has work commenced on the research and development in this subject.

Few building owners regard planned maintenance as a matter for serious concern, and yet cannot afford to allow buildings, old or new, to decay through neglect. As it is clearly impractical and even undesirable to replace building, whether as owners, designers, constructors, or users should take a serious interest in this vast problem of building maintenance.

1.2 BUILDING MAINTENANCE OVERVIEW

Maintenance assists retaining economic life of buildings. Moreover, it is a productive activity both at the private and the national levels. At the private level, proper maintenance leads to lower depreciation costs (due to longer economic life) and consequently leads to higher profitability. While at the national level, proper maintenance leads to lower expenditures on replacement. Thus, allowing more expenditure on expansion into new productive investment (Ikhwan, 1996).

The Committee on Building Maintenance in British defined maintenance as: “Building Maintenance is the work undertaken in order to keep, restore or improve every facility, i.e. every part of a building, its services and surrounds to a currently acceptable standard, and to sustain the utility and value of the building”(Mills, 1980).

In addition, maintenance is defined in the British Standards (BS 3811:1974) as “A combination of any action carried out to retain an item in, or restore it to an acceptable condition” (Mills, 1980).

A more functional definition is that “Maintenance is synonymous with controlling the condition of a building so that its pattern lies within specified regions”. (Shear, 1983)

Moreover, building maintenance cost can be defined as the cost of any actions carried out to retain an item in, or restore it to an acceptable condition but excluding any improvements other than those necessitated by inability to replace obsolete materials or components (Seeley, 1976).

The objectives of building maintenance are therefore (Alner and Fellows, 1990):

To ensure that buildings and their associated services are in a safe condition.
To ensure that the buildings are fit for use.
To ensure that the condition of the building meets all statutory requirements.
To carry out the maintenance work necessary to maintain the value of the physical assets of the building stock.
To carry out the work necessary to maintain the quality of the building.

Maintenance can be done in different stages. Each stage will have different characteristics. Liska defined those stages as follows:

Planning and Design Stage: the planning and designing of the facility should be based on the identified function and be as maintenance free as possible. In this stage a lot of money can be saved with the proper plan and design. For this reason, the building manager and maintenance personnel should be consulted during the early stages of the building design.
Construction Stage: in order to achieve minimum level of maintenance during the building life, work performed during the construction phase must be done with the highest quality in term of workmanship. As a result, expert contractor should be selected to perform the project.
Maintenance Stage: in this stage, maintenance is performed after the building has been constructed and occupied.

1.3 OBJECTIVES OF THE RESEARCH

The main objectives of this research are as follows:

To study and analyze the concept of building maintenance.
To study the main factors affecting the building maintenance cost.
To study some ways that help in managing building maintenance.

1.4 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

The research commenced by reviewing and analyzing the relevant literature. Then, it gives an overview of the building maintenance cost concepts. Also, the factors affecting the building maintenance cost are explained. In addition, some maintenance management approaches that aim to reduce the maintenance costs of existing building are highlighted.

1.5 LITERATURE REVIEW

The British Former Minister of Public Building and Works recognized the importance of research in various aspects of building maintenance when he established the committee on building maintenance in 1965. In the three decades after World War II, research in the field was mainly directed at properties of materials and few of the results were actually implemented. Therefore, the relationship between design, maintenance, execution of maintenance, economic significance of maintenance, and the actual performance of the materials and components under varying condition should be considered (Al-Shiha, 1993).

In the early nineties, Neely developed data bases of takes that cover all maintenance work required over the building. The data bases include the entire component that could be found in buildings constructed by private industry and government agencies. The results of Neely identification include:

All tasks that had to be performed to maintain the components in the standard operating order.
All possible components that could exist in any building.
Task resource information was developed for each task to record labor and materials resources.
The labor hours required to perform each task was determined by dividing the task into sub task.

In the early nineties, researcher notes the heavy need to conduct such types of studies. Moreover, many researchers did specific studies related to their countries.

In 1993, Al-Shiha conducted a research discussing the effect of faulty design and construction factors on building maintenance. As a result, the most severe factors which affect the maintenance works and causes the high maintenance cost are determined as: inadequate structural design such as foundation, hiring unqualified designers, not complying with specification, not relating exterior materials selection to climate conditions, inadequate waterproofing and drainage, unqualified workplace, inability to read the dawning’s.

The criteria affecting the priority rating of public building maintenance works were studied by Al-Majed in the late nineties. Twenty three criteria were identified (i.e. Function of the building, location, initial cost… etc.). These criteria were classified into two major groups as follows:

Building performance group: Twelve criteria which emphasis on the building.
Managerial group: Eleven criteria which deal with decision-making process and behavior of decision maker.

Iqhwan in the early nineties proposed some concrete measures that can lead to the improvement of maintenance status in Saudi Arabia along the following dimension:

Developing and enforcing sound of maintenance practices.
Supporting researches in maintenance management systems appropriate to Saudi Arabia.

These measures are

Study and assessment of maintenance status along with the two dimensions.
Development of adequate maintenance management information education program.

In conclusion, many researchers highlighted the importance of maintenance.

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