Video Series

Video: Introducing AIA Contract Documents Facilities Maintenance Documents

May 2, 2023

AIA Contract Documents facilities maintenance documents are designed to address the business conditions and legal environment of facilities maintenance. The documents are intended to be used when a client hires a contractor to perform any building repair, maintenance, or improvement. To learn more about the new facilities maintenance documents, watch this short video or visit: AIA Contract Documents New Facility Maintenance Agreements

Video Transcript

Table of Contents

Introduction

Hello, and welcome to another edition of on our terms a video series by AIA Contract Documents.

In this video, I’m going to be talking about a new set of building and maintenance contracts that are offered by the AIA Contract Documents program. These documents were published in early 2023 and are fairly unique in the industry of standard form contracts. I’ll give you a short overview of these maintenance contracts and explain why these contracts are different than traditional construction contracts.

As always, nothing provided in this video isn’t intended to be legal advice. If you are in need of legal advice, the best thing you can do is to contact a local attorney who is licensed in your jurisdiction to give you advice based on your specific facts and circumstances, and with that let’s talk about maintenance contracts.

Two Types of Maintenance Agreements

First thing to understand about maintenance contracts is that they can generally be broken down into two major categories. Contracts for as needed maintenance work and contracts for ongoing maintenance work. This is a straightforward distinction but worth highlighting because it makes a big difference from a contractual perspective.

As Needed Maintenance Work

As needed maintenance work, focuses on discrete building repairs. These are one-off repairs or maintenance items that tend to pop up unexpectedly. The duration of work and the duration of the contractual relationship for as needed maintenance items tends to be extremely short, even as short as a day or a few hours. If you’ve ever had a plumbing emergency at your house, you have a good idea of what this kind of as needed work is all about.

Ongoing Maintenance

On the other end of the spectrum is ongoing maintenance work. These are engagements for repetitive work that needs to be performed as part of a building’s upkeep. Most commercial properties have a large amount of these ongoing maintenance needs and they can include anything from lawn care to routine HVAC preventative maintenance to janitorial services. These maintenance contracts tend to be somewhat open-ended in their time frame although they usually start with a one-year term and extend out from there. These ongoing service contracts allow maintenance contractor to perform repetitive maintenance work at set intervals over time.

Given this important distinction between as needed and ongoing maintenance work, it will come as no surprise that the new maintenance contracts offered by the AIA Contract Documents program will diverge along these lines.

Maintenance Documents

Here is a full listing of the initial set of Maintenance contracts that the AIA contract Document program published in early 2023. This includes:

F-101 which is a master maintenance agreement that can be used in situations where a building owner or property manager expects to hire a maintenance contractor on a repeat basis. This F-101 can be paired with either:

Using a master agreement like the F-101, can be very helpful. If for example, you intend to perform maintenance work on several buildings for the same client over time. If this is the case, you can enter into F-101 for the core relationship between the owner and maintenance contractor then just enter into F201 and F202 work orders each time the contractor needs to perform a new piece of work. This way, you don’t have to renegotiate the full terms of the agreement each time the maintenance contractor is asked to do new maintenance work.

F-102 and F-103 are one-off agreements that can be used when you do not need a master agreement, so if you just want to hire a maintenance contractor for a one-off as needed repair, F-102 is the document to pick.

Or if you want to hire a maintenance contractor to perform one type of ongoing maintenance on one building, F-103 is the document to pick.

So to further illustrate these distinctions, if you’re a property manager and just want to hire a janitorial contractor to clean one building for a year long term then you probably don’t need a master agreement. F103 would be the best document to select in that scenario. However, if you think you might be hiring that same janitorial contractor over and over again to clean additional buildings or even buildings that you may purchase at a later date, then the F-101 master agreement would be a better choice and pair that with the F202 work orders as the need arises.

Commonly Used Forms

This set of documents also comes with four commonly used forms.

  • F701, is an amendment form and it can be used to amend any of the agreements already mentioned.
  • F702, is an invoice that the main maintenance contractor can use to request payment from the client.
  • F703 is a form that the client can use to request the maintenance contractor to provide certificates of insurance and
  • F704 is a status report that a maintenance contractor can use to inform the owner of ongoing maintenance activities.

Lastly, it’s important to note that there are differences between maintenance contracts and construction contracts. Here at AIA Contract Documents, we publish a lot of Construction contracts however, the documents that I’ve described in this video are our first ever maintenance contracts, and if you’ve ever attempted to use one of our construction contracts to hire a maintenance contractor, you’ve probably realized that there’s a heavy amount of editing that you need to do in order to make it work. That’s because maintenance contracts and construction contracts have some pretty important differences.

Here are just a few of the big differences:

  1. payment for maintenance contracts is typically done through invoicing rather than applications for payment.
  2. Maintenance contractors tend to work towards completion of the project rather than the two-stage process of achieving substantial completion then achieving final completion that you’re going to find in a Construction contract. Without going too in depth about construction contracts, it’s worth pointing out that most construction contracts have a fairly detailed process where an architect of record conducts inspections to determine the date or dates of substantial completion. This happens before the building achieves final completion and it is an important stage in the timeline of a construction project. That same substantial completion process is almost never going to happen on a maintenance contract.
  3. In many instances, there will not be an architect or engineer who is actively involved in the work of a maintenance contractor. This is quite different than a Construction contract where a design professional is going to be creating drawings and specifications, they might observe the work of the contractor, and they all will also be asked to review applications for payment. While there are certainly some instances where a maintenance contractor would work with design Professionals in a similar manner to a Construction contract, you’re not going to find those processes in the AIA’s new maintenance agreements.
  4. And lastly, many maintenance activities do not need permitting in the same way new construction does, so obviously you’re going to want to check with your local jurisdiction for your particular maintenance scenarios but just know that these new maintenance contracts do not actually have permitting obligations embedded within them.

Conclusion

If you have any questions please leave them in the comments section below we have plenty of other ways to get questions answered as well you can see them a lot of them on the screen here again nothing in this video is intended to be legal advice and thank you for watching.