Committee on the Environment

This message has been cross posted to the following Discussion Forums: Committee on the Environment and Committee on Design .
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I wanted to share and request feedback for a project I'm working on that aims to benchmark long term operating costs for a variety of building types in the hopes searching for design solutions to high ongoing expenses.  I've found fragmented data that you might find useful, but really I'm writing in the hopes that you can point me to new sources of info, particularly in the hospitality sector:

I always keep the latest copy of the Whitestone Facility Maintenance and Repair Cost Reference. I find it very useful for life cycle cost analysis. Costs are broken down by task, material, and multiple labor rates. There are factors for market, building type, prevailing wage, etc. It's about as straightforward to use as a Means or Saylor cost estimating guide. As with those references, there's still a good amount of educated guessing that goes on between the lines, but you can usually get comfortably conservative M&O costs to work with. I can't vouch personally for the accuracy of the Whitestone numbers, but keep in mind that at the design phase of a project, when comparing a baseline against alternatives, incremental costs are more important than absolute costs. In other words, use it for life cycle cost analysis, but don't rely on it for actual M&O budgeting purposes unless you have a good deal of expertise in that area.

Thanks for the heads up about the whitestone research... Sounds like a good investment.  I wanted to load a few other responses that I received via email... Apologies if these were somehow already sent to the group, but it doesn't look like that was the case.  Thanks much to all who responded: