Building Owners and Managers Editing and Proofreading Services

A tenant moves into the fourth floor and begins a fit-out. Over the next six weeks they will drill into a slab containing post-tensioned tendons, connect to a chilled water system with no spare capacity, block a smoke vent with a partition, and work on a Saturday when the building's cooling is off. None of it is malicious. Nobody gave them a document that said any of those things.

We edit what building owners and managing agents produce — tenant handbooks and building rules, fit-out guides and contractor requirements, service and access arrangements documentation, building systems and capacity information for tenants, health, safety and fire arrangements for occupiers, service charge budgets and explanatory material, move-in and move-out procedures, maintenance and works notifications, sustainability and utility data communications, and incident and emergency communications to occupiers. Our editors work on the guide a tenant's contractor will use.

The tenant handbook and fit-out guide is where a building either protects itself or spends the next decade repairing avoidable damage, and its failure is a document about rules rather than about the building. A handbook listing permitted working hours and a requirement to obtain approval tells a fit-out contractor nothing about what they are about to drill into. We work through these so the building's actual constraints are stated as facts a designer can work with — the slab type and what may not be fixed to it, the available power per floor and the spare capacity, the chilled water and ventilation capacity with what is already committed, the routes and their fire compartmentation; so the things that are absolutely prohibited are listed separately from the things requiring approval, since a list where everything needs approval means nothing gets asked; so the approval process states what to submit, who reviews it and how long they take, because a two-week review nobody knew about is a two-week delay somebody will work around; so the practical facts of working in the building are given — lift booking, out-of-hours cooling, waste routes, noise windows and what the neighbours will complain about; so the reinstatement expectation is stated at move-in rather than at move-out; and so the emergency arrangements name what a tenant must do rather than what the building will do. Handbooks written this way prevent the damage that service charges eventually pay for.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including building information, handbooks and tenant correspondence. We are editors rather than building, engineering or fire safety consultants, and we offer no view on building systems, capacities or safety arrangements. What we can do is make the handbook describe the building rather than the rules.