Portfolio and space management
Buildings, floors and space records structured around how your estate is actually held, mixing owned and leased sites cleanly.
✦ Facilities management
CAFM software development
Computer aided facilities management software exists to give an estates or facilities team one place to see every building, every contractor and every compliance date, instead of that picture living across spreadsheets, inboxes and one person's memory. When an off-the-shelf CAFM product does not match your portfolio or your service contracts, we build one that does.
✦ The problem
Why generic CAFM software strains across a mixed portfolio
Facilities and estates teams are not maintaining a single machine, they are managing a portfolio: offices, retail units, warehouses or public buildings, often leased and owned, often serviced by a mix of in-house staff and outsourced contractors. A generic CAFM product assumes a fairly standard building type and a fairly standard set of soft and hard services.
That assumption breaks down quickly with a varied estate. Lease and compliance obligations differ by building, contractor SLAs differ by service type, and space or occupancy reporting needs differ depending on whether a building is owned, leased out, or leased in. Facilities teams end up keeping a shadow spreadsheet for the parts the CAFM system cannot represent, which is exactly the problem the software was bought to remove.
A bespoke CAFM system is built around your actual portfolio structure, your actual contractor and SLA model, and the actual compliance obligations that attach to each building, so the estates team has one real source of truth rather than a system plus a workaround.
✦ Capability
What a bespoke CAFM system typically covers
Planned and reactive maintenance
Hard and soft service schedules and reactive requests logged and tracked against each building, not a single generic asset list.
Contractor and SLA management
Contractor performance and response times tracked against the specific SLAs in each service contract, with automatic escalation when they slip.
Compliance and statutory records
Fire, electrical, water and lease compliance dates held per building with alerts well ahead of each deadline.
Helpdesk and request logging
A simple way for building occupants to log an issue, with visibility for the facilities team on status and resolution.
Cost and service charge reporting
Maintenance and service costs reported per building or per lease, feeding directly into service charge reconciliation.
✦ Honest advice
When an off-the-shelf CAFM system is the right answer
If you manage a small number of similar buildings, your contractor relationships follow standard SLA templates, and your compliance requirements are typical for the building type, a configured off-the-shelf CAFM product will usually serve you well and cost less to get running. Mature CAFM vendors have solid helpdesk and planned maintenance modules, and there is little reason to rebuild those.
Bespoke development is worth it when your portfolio mixes building types or tenure arrangements that a generic product cannot represent cleanly, when service charge or lease reporting needs are specific to your leases, or when licence costs across a large portfolio have grown to the point a fixed-cost build pays for itself. We would rather say plainly on the first call that a licensed product will do the job, if that is true.
✦ Integration
Systems a CAFM platform usually needs to talk to
- Building management systems (BMS) for energy and environmental data
- Access control and security systems, where occupancy data feeds space planning
- Finance systems, so service charge and maintenance costs reconcile automatically
- Contractor portals, so work order status updates without a phone call
- HR or occupancy systems, where space allocation needs to reflect headcount
✦ Approach
How we build a CAFM system
1
Map the estate as it actually is
Ownership, leases and service arrangements vary by building, and we model that structure properly rather than forcing every site into one template.
2
Build around real contractor SLAs
Response and completion targets are configured from your actual service contracts, so performance reporting means something.
3
Put compliance dates front and centre
Statutory and lease compliance deadlines are surfaced with enough warning to act, not discovered after the fact.
4
Roll out building by building
We typically launch on a subset of the portfolio, prove the workflow, then extend across the rest of the estate.
✦ Questions we get asked
CAFM software questions
What is the difference between CAFM and a CMMS?
CAFM manages buildings, space and the services that keep them running - cleaning, security, compliance, leases - and is used by facilities and estates teams. A CMMS manages production and operational equipment and is used by maintenance engineering teams. See our computerised maintenance management system page for the maintenance-engineering equivalent.
Can a CAFM system handle a mixed portfolio of owned and leased buildings?
Yes, and this is one of the most common reasons a bespoke build is chosen over an off-the-shelf product, since generic CAFM software often assumes a single tenure model across the whole portfolio.
Does it replace our helpdesk, or sit alongside it?
It can do either. Some clients want request logging built directly into the CAFM system, others already have a helpdesk they are happy with and simply need it integrated so status updates flow through without double entry.
How does it handle statutory compliance dates?
Every compliance obligation - fire, electrical, water, lease-related - is held against the relevant building with alerts set well ahead of the deadline, so nothing depends on someone remembering a spreadsheet.
Can contractors update job status themselves?
Yes, a contractor-facing portal or mobile view is a common addition, so status updates and completion evidence come in directly rather than through a phone call to the facilities office.
What does a bespoke CAFM system cost compared with a licensed product?
It depends on the size and complexity of the portfolio, and we only discuss real figures once we understand it. As a guide, it tends to make sense once portfolio-wide licence costs or reporting workarounds have become significant.
✦ Related
Where to go next
Talk to us about your CAFM system We'll tell you what we'd build.
Tell us about your portfolio and where the current system falls short. We will give you an honest view before any quote.
No pitch deck · We map your process · You own the software