A rooftop HVAC unit serves one retail tenant in a shopping center. Its filters need changing. Who changes them?

Ask three questions and, under a common arrangement, you get three different answers.

Who performs the maintenance? Often the tenant, when the unit serves only its space.
Who replaces the unit when it fails? Often the landlord.
Who ultimately pays for work the landlord does on the building? Potentially the tenants, through recoverable operating expenses.

But every one of those answers can change, because each is set by the lease, not by the equipment. The filter change is identical in every building. What differs in commercial property is who owns the task, who pays for it, and what record it has to leave. A checklist that lists tasks and frequencies without those answers tells you what to do but not whose job it is. That's the gap this checklist is built to close.

This article is operational guidance, not legal advice. Maintenance and repair obligations in commercial property are set by each lease, and lease practice varies between countries, states and property types. Treat the patterns below as common starting points to check against your own leases.

Three responsibility zones

Commercial lawyers describe a broadly consistent pattern. As one law firm puts it, the landlord is typically responsible for structural and major component parts and for replacements that count as capital expenditures, while the tenant handles maintenance and ordinary repairs inside its own premises. Leases often go further and shift responsibility for items that exclusively serve one tenant's space, with HVAC the common example.

That gives property teams three useful responsibility zones to start with. The physical location of an asset helps classify the task, but the lease determines who is actually responsible.

Lease type moves the lines. Even under a triple net lease, Holland & Knight notes that the landlord may still be required to repair major structural defects. We explain how gross, modified gross and triple net leases allocate costs in our guide to triple net leases. For the checklist, the point is simpler: before any task is scheduled, someone has to know which zone it's in under that tenant's lease, and who the lease makes responsible.

The checklist

The tags match our annual preventive maintenance calendar: regulatory where codes or regulations set the requirement, manufacturer where equipment guidance does, and property-set where the frequency is your team's judgment. Frequencies here are deliberately stated as their source rather than a universal number, because they depend on the equipment, the jurisdiction and the lease.

The last column is the one most checklists leave out. Whether a cost is recoverable depends entirely on each lease, and capital expenditure is commonly excluded, as our guide to CAM reconciliation explains. The column shows the question to answer, not the answer. The "typically performed by" column applies unless the lease assigns the obligation differently.

Base building

Tenant-serving systems

Tenant premises

Life-safety detail by market is covered in the life-safety inspection schedule across key markets, roof cadence in how often to inspect the roof and building envelope, and replacement decisions for HVAC in HVAC repair versus replacement.

Why HVAC gets its own standard

HVAC is where commercial maintenance is most often contested and most often under-specified, and it's one of the few systems with a dedicated maintenance standard.

ANSI/ASHRAE/ACCA Standard 180 sets minimum inspection and maintenance requirements for commercial building HVAC, intended, as the US Department of Energy's Better Buildings program describes it, to preserve a system's ability to deliver acceptable thermal comfort, energy efficiency and indoor air quality. Two parts of its published scope matter for a property manager.

It asks for a written plan, not just a schedule. The standard calls for a maintenance plan that includes performance objectives, and notes that manufacturers' maintenance information often covers only their own components rather than the whole system. A list of filter dates doesn't meet that intent. A plan that says what the system should achieve, and checks whether it does, does.

It excludes process equipment. Standard 180 doesn't apply to equipment that primarily serves industrial, manufacturing or commercial processes. That's the same line this checklist draws between the building and the tenant's operating equipment, and it matters most in industrial property.

What changes by property type

The zones apply everywhere. The emphasis shifts.

• Office. Multi-tenant office buildings often keep HVAC with the landlord, running from a central plant and a building automation system. Tenant comfort complaints are the most visible maintenance signal, and after-hours HVAC requests are a recurring operational and billing question. Elevators and the central plant dominate the schedule. 

• Retail. Rooftop units dedicated to individual tenants, food-service grease interceptors, storefronts, parking and site lighting. Triple net leases are most common in retail, so more tenant-serving systems may sit on the tenant's side, which makes confirming who has actually done the work more important, not less.

• Industrial. The building side is usually the roof, the slab, overhead and dock doors, fire sprinklers and the site. Forklifts and production equipment are generally part of the occupier's operations rather than the building's preventive maintenance program, the same distinction Standard 180 draws for process equipment. Racking, conveyors, dock levelers, overhead doors and similar equipment need the same lease-level responsibility check as other tenant-serving assets. 

Working around tenants

In a commercial building, the maintenance schedule has to fit around businesses that are trading.

• Access follows the lease. Entry to tenant premises for inspection or maintenance is usually governed by notice provisions in each lease. Build them into scheduling rather than improvising.

• Disruption has a price. A shutdown during a retailer's trading hours or an office's working day costs the tenant, and sometimes the landlord. Plan disruptive work for agreed windows, and budget for the after-hours rates that come with them.

• Tenant-side work still needs visibility. Where the landlord has an interest in the condition of a tenant-maintained system, such as one it will eventually replace, the process can require service records at defined intervals.

• Vendors need the same clarity. Response and restoration commitments for commercial trades, including elevator entrapment clocks, are covered in RIOO's guide to vendor SLAs for property management.

The record is part of the recovery

In commercial property, a maintenance record does two jobs. It shows the work was done, and it supports the cost when it's recovered.

At year-end, a CAM reconciliation compares what tenants paid in estimates against actual recoverable costs. Every cost included in a recoverable pool needs to be assigned to the right property, classified correctly, and permitted under the applicable lease. A task recorded against the wrong property, or a capital replacement coded as routine maintenance, becomes a line a tenant's auditor can challenge.

So the checklist's last column isn't an accounting footnote. Tagging each task by zone and recoverability when it's scheduled, rather than sorting costs at year-end, is what keeps the reconciliation defensible. How that reconciliation works is covered in our guide to CAM reconciliation, and why accounting and operations need to share the same records in what to look for in commercial property management accounting software. Replacements that fall outside the recoverable pool belong in the capital plan, which we covered in your work-order history isn't a capital plan yet.

Back to the rooftop unit. The filter change takes twenty minutes. Knowing whose twenty minutes they are, who pays for them, and whether the record will hold up when the tenant's auditor reads the reconciliation takes a system.

That's the real difference between a commercial maintenance checklist and a residential one. The work is similar. The ownership, the recovery and the evidence are not.

RIOO's maintenance planning and scheduling holds recurring work by property, service request and task management tracks work orders and scheduled inspections with maintenance history, and utility and assets management keeps equipment records, warranties and service documentation together. Because RIOO is built on NetSuite, maintenance costs sit in the same system that lease accounting and CAM reconciliation draw on.

Pick one multi-tenant building. For each rooftop unit, can you say who maintains it under the lease, who replaces it, and where the last service record is? If any answer needs a phone call, the checklist has tasks but not yet owners.

Frequently asked questions

Q1. What should a commercial building preventive maintenance checklist include?
Base building systems such as fire protection, elevators, backflow preventers, central plant, building automation, generators, roof and envelope, parking and common areas; tenant-serving systems such as dedicated HVAC units and grease interceptors; and a clear line for tenant premises. Each task should have a frequency, a source for that frequency, a responsible party under the lease and a recoverability question.

Q2. Who is responsible for HVAC maintenance in a commercial lease?
It depends on the lease. A common pattern is that the landlord maintains central systems and replaces major equipment, while leases often make tenants responsible for maintaining units that serve only their premises. Arrangements vary by property type, lease type and negotiation, so check each lease.

Q3. What is ASHRAE Standard 180?
ANSI/ASHRAE/ACCA Standard 180 sets minimum inspection and maintenance requirements for commercial building HVAC systems, aimed at preserving thermal comfort, energy efficiency and indoor air quality. It calls for a written maintenance plan with performance objectives, and does not apply to equipment primarily serving industrial or commercial processes.

Q4. Can preventive maintenance costs be recovered from commercial tenants?
Often, through recoverable operating expenses or CAM charges, but only as each lease allows. Capital expenditure is commonly excluded, and recoverability depends on the lease type and its specific terms.

Q5. How is commercial preventive maintenance different from residential?
The tasks overlap, but commercial maintenance adds a responsibility question to every task, set by each lease, and a recovery question for many costs. It also has to be scheduled around tenants' operating hours and access provisions.