Real Estate Management of sacral buildings: Evaluation of repair and maintenance costs

Today, church facility managers do not know their future maintenance budget requirements, with general information about repair and maintenance costs and their significant influential factors being not available in a structured way. The heterogeneous owner structure (each parish is the owner of their sacral building) does not allow to record uniformly cost data and provide minimal information about the building itself (e.g. name, location, age). Likewise, figures are only required in case of subsidising the parish. Thus, accurate maintenance planning is indispensible, especially in times of expected decreasing tax incomes and high responsibility for valuable buildings.The analysis presented here is the basis of a following investigation that will provide support for church facility managers to calculate the maintenance costs for sacral buildings in a medium and long term perspective. It focuses on repair and maintenance costs of 250 sacral buildings.Sacral buildings in this study are randomly selected catholic churches. The presented results are based on cost data collected from one catholic diocese of Germany. These cost data contain all transactions concerning maintenance measures over six years (2010 to 2016), which means nearly 14,000 transactions.First, the data is ordered systematically. For that the structure of the DIN norm 31051 "Maintenance fundamentals" is used. Initial results reveal how much costs are assumed in smaller measures, like technical service and inspection, and in greater measures, like repair and improvement. Furthermore, statistical methods are used to analyze the cost data in detail e.g. distributions. Second, the data is analysed by taking building elements and also available building characteristics (e.g. the age) into account. This procedure enables to investigate e.g. the construction’s or installed service’s effect on the costs and to clarify e.g. whether old buildings are more expensive than younger ones.Consequently the results reveal first correlations of repair and maintenance costs and buildings/characteristics.