Facility condition assessments and capital asset planning

What a facility condition assessment produces

An assessor walks every building in scope and records each major system: envelope, roof, mechanical, electrical, plumbing, interiors and site. Each is scored for condition and remaining service life, and priced at current local installed cost. The result is a deferred maintenance backlog you can total, sort and defend, and a projection of what the portfolio needs year by year.

• Facility Condition Index per building and across the portfolio
• Deferred maintenance backlog, itemised and priced
• Renewal projection by system and by year
• Photographic record of every assessed system

Capital asset planning across a portfolio

One building’s assessment is a report. A portfolio’s assessments are a capital plan, and the difference is being able to rank. When every asset is scored the same way against the same cost basis, a facilities director can answer which roof goes first and why, in a form that survives a public meeting. That ranking is the deliverable that matters; the individual reports support it.

• Consistent scoring across every asset, so rankings are defensible
• Scenario comparison: funded, constrained, and deferred
• Board-ready and council-ready summaries alongside the technical detail

What is the Facility Condition Index?

The Facility Condition Index is the ratio of a building’s accumulated deficiencies to its current replacement value, expressed as a percentage. A building carrying $500,000 of deficiencies against a $10,000,000 replacement value has an FCI of 5 percent. It is the single number that makes a portfolio comparable: a 1918 school and a 2004 maintenance facility cannot be ranked against each other by dollars alone, and can be by condition. Lower is better, and most owners treat the low single digits as good, the teens as poor, and anything above thirty percent as a candidate for replacement rather than renewal.

• FCI is computed, not estimated: it falls out of the deficiency list and the replacement value
• Reported per building and rolled up across the portfolio
• Recomputed under each funding scenario, so the effect of a budget decision is visible
• Thresholds are set with you, because a "poor" cutoff is an owner policy rather than a standard

What a facility condition assessment report contains

The report is organised so that the people who read only four pages of it read the right four. It opens with the portfolio summary and rankings, then the per-building record: systems assessed, condition and remaining life for each, the priced deficiency list, and the photographic evidence behind every finding. The renewal projection follows, by system and by year, with the funding scenarios side by side. Assumptions and cost basis are stated in the report rather than held back, so a reviewer can check the arithmetic instead of taking it on faith.

• Portfolio summary with rankings and index scores
• Per-building system inventory, condition, and remaining service life
• Priced deficiency list with photographic evidence
• Renewal projection by system and year, under each funding scenario
• Stated cost basis, assumptions, and assessment date

Cost per square foot, and why we do not publish one

Assessment work is commonly priced per square foot, and the range quoted in the market is wide enough that the number tells an owner very little. What drives the real figure is building count and complexity rather than area: twenty small buildings cost far more to assess than one large building of the same total footprint, because each needs its own systems inventory, its own photographs and its own record. A campus of similar structures assessed in one mobilisation is cheaper per square foot than a scattered portfolio, and a facility with heavy mechanical plant is dearer than a warehouse. We scope from building count, gross area and access, and quote a fixed fee against that.

Who this is for

Municipal and county facilities departments, school districts, special districts, and public authorities that own buildings and have to plan for them. The common thread is a capital request that has to be justified to someone who did not walk the buildings.

How the work is staffed and priced

The firm is veteran owned and led by an ICC-certified residential contractor and licensed general contractor. Where a scope requires licensed structural or MEP review, we team with licensed engineering subconsultants and deliver one unified study: their stamped opinions cover their disciplines, assembled into a single record with our own condition capture. Every cost cites its source and its as-of date: published 2026 estimator data, location-adjusted, corrected by verified local costs as we accumulate them.