I always keep the latest copy of the Whitestone Facility Maintenance and Repair Cost Reference. I find it very useful for life cycle cost analysis. Costs are broken down by task, material, and multiple labor rates. There are factors for market, building type, prevailing wage, etc. It's about as straightforward to use as a Means or Saylor cost estimating guide. As with those references, there's still a good amount of educated guessing that goes on between the lines, but you can usually get comfortably conservative M&O costs to work with. I can't vouch personally for the accuracy of the Whitestone numbers, but keep in mind that at the design phase of a project, when comparing a baseline against alternatives, incremental costs are more important than absolute costs. In other words, use it for life cycle cost analysis, but don't rely on it for actual M&O budgeting purposes unless you have a good deal of expertise in that area.
I haven't had the need to delve into the MARS system, yet. For $300/year, I can highly recommend the Cost Reference for use in any pre-design or design-phase life cycle cost or whole building analysis. It sits on the shelf right next to my Saylor's cost estimating guides.
Cheers.
-------------------------------------------
Eric Shamp AIA
Owner
Ecotype Consulting
Redlands CA
-------------------------------------------
Original Message:
Sent: 08-24-2010 12:39
From: Joel McKellar
Subject: Long Term Operating, Maintance, and Repair Benchmarking Studies
This message has been cross posted to the following Discussion Forums: Committee on the Environment and Committee on Design .
-------------------------------------------
I wanted to share and request feedback for a project I'm working on that aims to benchmark long term operating costs for a variety of building types in the hopes searching for design solutions to high ongoing expenses. I've found fragmented data that you might find useful, but really I'm writing in the hopes that you can point me to new sources of info, particularly in the hospitality sector: - BOMA Experience Exchange Report: I love this report, but it's limited to commercial offices only. If I could have this level of detail in every sector this project would be much easier.
- AS&U Magazines' Annual Maintenance and Operations Studies: College and K-12: These are good (and FREE), but not quite the level of detail of the BOMA EER.
- US Energy Information Administrations Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey: Good source for energy benchmarks across sectors, including breakdowns of the end-uses of the energy by sector. Unfortunately, we're still stuck with the 2003 data (2007 info has been 'in process' for years now).
Best,
Joel McKellar, LEED AP BD+C
Research
Associate
_____________________________________________
LS3P ASSOCIATES LTD.
Architecture Interior Architecture Planning
Connect with us: LS3P l Knowledge Center l Twitter l LinkedIn