Development of maintenance cost prediction model for heritage buildings

The lack of a simple and accurate method of estimating heritage buildings maintenance costs makes it difficult for custodians and owners of heritage building to make realistic maintenance budgets and to develop good financial plan for managing the maintenance works to heritage buildings. The purpose of this paper is to develop a model for predicting the maintenance costs of heritage buildings. To achieve the aforementioned objective, the paper combined a literature review, cost modeling, survey and case studies. The survey and case studies were adopted in order to validate the maintenance cost prediction model. The model validation results show that the maintenance cost prediction model has about 93% accuracy in predicting annual maintenance cost for heritage buildings based on the building age, gross floor area and building performance index. The model could help custodians and owners of heritage building to forecast maintenance costs easily and accurately, make realistic maintenance budgets and to develop good financial plan for managing the maintenance works of the buildings in their care.