Building systems

Every building is a collection of systems — a roof, a heating plant, an electrical service — and each one has a story. When it went in, who has touched it since, what that cost.

That story is worth money. A system nobody can vouch for gets priced as though it is at the end of its life, because that is the safe assumption for a buyer who cannot tell. Evidence closes that discount.

The snapshot

Open a property and go to Systems. The first thing you see is the building in one screen: one line per system, showing what it is, when it was installed, when it was last serviced, and how many records it carries.

The header counts how much of the building is documented — 7 of 8 — which is the number to work down before a property goes to market.

Systems with no records

A system showing No records is not an empty row. It is a finding, and it is the most useful line on the screen.

For you, it is the list of what to chase before listing. For a buyer, it is an honest statement that nobody knows — which is a far better position than silence, because a buyer who can see which systems are undocumented prices those, rather than assuming the worst about all of them.

Install dates you only half know

Records are ragged, and Everre does not make you invent precision you do not have. An install date can be:

• a full date — 12 December 2009
• a month — August 2020
• a year — 2018
• Original, for something that has been there since the building went up
• Unknown

Everre shows exactly what you recorded. A roof entered as August 2020 is never displayed as the 1st of August, because you never said that.

Logging work

Add a record against a system and give it whatever you have: what was done, when, who did it, what it cost, and the receipt.

Attach the receipt. A photo or a PDF, on the record itself. It uploads as you pick it, lands in the property's files, and is governed by the same permissions as anything else in the drive. Once attached it opens straight from the record.

You can attach one to the installation too — when you add a system and give its install date, you can record what it cost, who put it in, and the invoice. That becomes the system's first record.

Vendors are company records. Pick the contractor from your companies and the work is linked to them — so "who did we use for tuckpointing" becomes something you can look up rather than something you try to remember. If you have a name off an invoice and no company record yet, type the name and add the company later.

Costs are classified. Mark a record as capital, operating, warranty or an insurance claim. Routine operating spend is left out of the invested total, so the annual boiler inspection does not inflate the number you quote.

Work with no system

Not everything belongs to a system. A resurfaced parking lot, a common-area renovation, a unit turn — log these the same way and leave the system blank. They still count toward the building's capital history, because the money was still spent.

Remaining life

Where you have entered an expected useful life for a system, the snapshot counts down from the install date and shows what is left — or Overdue once it is past.

Where you have not, it shows a dash. Everre does not estimate a lifespan from the kind of system, because an assumed twenty years for a roof is not a fact about your roof, and a countdown built on it reads as though it were. If you want the number, enter the figure you actually believe.

Have your agent do it

Forward a receipt or an invoice to your agent's email address and it will read it and file the record against the right system — the date, the vendor, the amount, with the receipt attached.

Because the figures are read off a photograph, Everre does not simply take them as read. The finished record goes to your review queue with the receipt beside it, so you can accept it or correct a digit before it stands. You are approving something you can see, not a request to trust it.

You can also just ask:

What have we spent on the Kedzie building since 2019?

Which systems have no service records?

Sharing with a buyer

Service records are private to your organisation by default. During a live deal you can publish individual records to the parties in the portal, which answers a diligence question on a page instead of over a week of email.

Nothing reaches a buyer until you publish it. Your own notes on what things really cost, and which vendor was a problem, stay yours.