There’s something about property problems that can make us feel like we need to act straight away. A building report lands, a lease is coming up, the maintenance list is getting longer, someone says the roof needs replacing, or a consultant recommends further investigation.
Before long, what started as an issue to understand can quite easily turn into a project to deliver.
But sometimes the right decision is to do nothing, or at least not do anything yet. I’m not talking about ignoring maintenance or leaving problems until they become urgent. We know that doesn’t work, and there’s plenty of evidence showing just how expensive it can become.
Treasury has pointed to underfunding of maintenance and renewals across parts of New Zealand’s social infrastructure. It also references the Infrastructure Commission’s estimate that for every $1 spent on new infrastructure, around 60 cents needs to be spent maintaining and renewing what we already have.
We can see some of the consequences of falling behind in local government. Councils own at least $76 billion of infrastructure assets, and the Auditor-General has described a widespread backlog of repairs, maintenance and renewals after years of assets not being replaced as quickly as they have been run down.
It’s not just a New Zealand issue either. In the United States, the estimated deferred maintenance and repair backlog across federal buildings increased from about US$170 billion in 2017 to US$370 billion in 2024.
So clearly, putting things off indefinitely isn’t good property management. But neither is assuming that every issue needs to be dealt with immediately simply because we now know about it.
A roof might need replacing in the next few years, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it needs replacing this year. A building might not be working particularly well, but if the organisation itself is changing, spending a significant amount of money altering it now might not make sense. A maintenance plan might identify $150,000 worth of work, but once you understand the condition of the building and the risks involved, perhaps only $30,000 genuinely needs to happen this year and the rest can be planned over the next three.
The same applies to bigger property decisions. If a lease is coming to an end, moving isn’t automatically the answer. Staying for another twelve months might give an organisation time to properly understand what it needs next rather than rushing into another building because a deadline is approaching.
Technical reports are another good example. They can contain pages of observations, recommendations and suggested work, and it’s very easy to come away feeling as though the whole lot needs to be addressed. Often the more useful exercise is working through what actually needs attention now, what can be monitored, what should be budgeted for later, and what may not warrant doing at all.
I think that’s the part that can get lost. Finding out that something is wrong doesn’t automatically tell you what to do about it, and it certainly doesn’t tell you when you need to do it.
There’s a big difference between maintenance being deferred because nobody has dealt with it and work being deliberately scheduled for later because someone has looked at the condition, understood the risk and made a conscious decision about when the money should be spent.
From the outside, both situations can look exactly the same because nothing is happening. The difference is that in one case there isn’t a plan, and in the other there is.
Sometimes, after looking at all of that, the perfectly reasonable conclusion is that nothing needs to happen right now.
And that’s still a property decision.