December / January
Seasons Greetings
Merry Christmas, we wish you all a very merry Christmas and a happy new year.
Annual Membership Renewals
Membership renewals have started and individual emails will be sent shortly.
For $100 per member per year, you will continue to have access to the growing and evolving tool box and the demonstration system.
NAMS subscribers currently have access to the web demonstration system provided by SPM, and are currently limited to setting up 20 properties and up to 500 components within their own portfolio. Subscribers may be interested to know that SPM released a new version of the system to its customer base on 6 December 2007. This release contains a range of exciting new features to support customers in proactive asset management planning, and includes improved facilities to set up saved selections of properties for survey scheduling and analysis; a new components workspace enabling multi-updating of components across many properties together with the ability to conduct graphical analysis; an additional algorithm to support component renewals analysis and scenario modelling using an age-condition risk based approach; enhancements to property quality standards enabling user-defined levels of compliance to be set up combined with the ability to undertake graphical analysis and the ability to generate PDF versions of graphs and standard reports.
Please note this new functionality is not available in the NAMS web demonstration system. Subscribers wishing to know more about the SPM Property application should contact
Roger Jameson (tel +64 (0)9 921 4021)
Building Component Guidelines (BCG)
The 2007 Building Component Guidelines (BCG) will be released in January 2008. Rawlinsons have completed their annual update of the BCGs where the unit rates for each of the four New Zealand regions have been updated to reflect the movement in the construction market over the past year. The previous release was referred to as the 2nd Vrs 2006 BCG’s due to the timing of last years Rawlinson’s update and the release of the 2006 NAMS Property manual. All future releases will now be annual and timed with the production of the Rawlinson’s Construction Cost Handbook.
The key differences between the 2006 Vrs 2 BCGs and the 2007 BCG’s are as follows:
- External Fabric – increased by an average of 2% with External Wall Plaster being the largest increase at 23% and Compressed Fibre Roofing being a decrease of 6%
- Internal Finishes - increased by an average of 4%
- Services - increased by an average of 8%
- External works and sundry – increased by an average of 1%
Organisations that are using the BCGs as the basis of their asset data including valuations and renewals expenditure calculations, need to consider how and when they need to update their base data. The changes require consideration of updating unit rates and review of ‘standard components’. This may also provide an opportunity to review the quality of other related data, which of course will happen on a regular basis anyway!
NAMS Training for 2008
NAMS have established their programme of
Training Events for 2008.
Although most of the events target infrastructure asset management, they do provide good overall asset management planning principles and will provide plenty of networking opportunity. The NAMS Property training is scheduled for March 2008 – make sure you register early. The training will target the feedback from the Local Authority Property Association’s conference held in September 2007 where there was a request for more focused training and workshops on ‘levels of service’ specifically for property assets. In response, the training will include a practical workshop where we will develop ‘property quality standards’ as a way to measure ‘levels of service’ statements and think through how to address any performance shortfalls with property asset solutions. And importantly, develop the links between all three aspects.
New Members
We welcome new members from South Africa and Australia, the new membership covers Asset Consultants, Health, Local Government, Housing and Aviation.
Benchmarking
Benchmarking study using data from 11 organisations has now been completed and shows some interesting results. The following two graphs provide an insight to the type of results from the study.
The majority of small to medium sized Councils have assessed about 5,000 to 8,000 components associated with a wide range of property types. Councils 7 and 10 have a significant amount of housing assets that distort the overall component count.
The relationship between the condition grades can act as a ‘sanity check’. In this case, organisation 5 should review how their surveyors judge the differences between a component that is in a very good condition (C1) compared to a good condition (C2).
Please let us know anything happening in your organisation or industry…
