What a Mechanical Service Agreement Should Actually Include
Most preventive maintenance contracts are filter changes with a invoice attached. Here's what institutional owners should expect instead.
· 2 min read · Silver Spur Mechanical
Ask three contractors for a maintenance proposal on the same building and you'll get three documents that look similar and mean entirely different things. One is quarterly filter changes. One is filter changes plus a discount on repairs. One is an actual programme.
The difference only becomes visible when something breaks.
The test: what happens on a Tuesday in August
A good agreement is judged on its worst day, not its best. When a unit fails on the hottest afternoon of the year, the questions are immediate: who's coming, when, do they know this building, and does anyone know what's on that roof?
An agreement that can't answer those quickly isn't a programme. It's a filter subscription.
What should be in it
A tagged asset inventory. Every piece of equipment identified, labelled and recorded — make, model, serial, tonnage, install date, condition. This is the part most contracts skip, and it's the part that makes everything else possible. Without it, every service call starts with a discovery process you're paying for.
Consumables carried in the agreement. Filters and belts are predictable. They should be scheduled and priced into the contract, not appearing as change orders three times a year.
Refrigerant compliance records. EPA recordkeeping obligations don't disappear because they're inconvenient. Logs should be maintained on your behalf and produced on request — not reconstructed when someone asks.
Written condition reporting per visit. Not a signed ticket confirming somebody attended. A report, per asset, that an asset manager can read and forward to ownership without translating it first.
Priority dispatch with a named escalation path. Agreement properties should move ahead of ad-hoc callers, and there should be a person — not a queue — to escalate to.
Defined labour rates for out-of-scope work. Repairs outside the agreement will happen. The rate should be agreed in advance rather than negotiated while a building is warm.
The economics people miss
The common objection is that planned maintenance costs money on buildings that aren't broken. That's true, and it's the wrong comparison.
The real comparison is against the cost of unplanned failure: emergency rates, expedited equipment at whatever price is available, tenant disruption, and the capital consequence of equipment that failed early because nobody noticed it degrading. A compressor that dies from a dirty coil didn't reach end of life — it was retired early by neglect.
There's a second, less obvious return. A portfolio under a documented programme has a defensible answer on deferred maintenance when a lender, buyer or investment committee asks. Portfolios without one are guessing, and buyers price guesswork conservatively.
How to compare proposals honestly
Put the documents side by side and ask:
- Does it list my equipment, specifically — or describe services generically?
- What do I receive in writing after each visit?
- What is the response commitment, and what happens when it isn't met?
- What's included, and what generates an additional invoice?
- At the end of a year, what do I know about my portfolio that I didn't know before?
The last question is the one that separates a programme from a subscription. If the answer is "nothing," you've bought filter changes.