I wish I knew about lift consultants when we replaced our lift a few years ago! We are a small block of six, so a new lift is a big expense for us with only six owners to bear the cost. We saved for that lift through increased levies over a three year period. One of our owners took on the price negotiations and we got the lift for $160K. Eight weeks with no lift – so difficult for the elderly people in the building. And then the new lift kept breaking down. We were so disappointed. That’s when we learned how far down the priority list we were for call-outs. Hospitals and nursing homes get first preference behind people actually stuck in a lift. Then big towers. Small blocks with elderly residents just don’t get attention. The entire service system was automated with no people to speak with. We ended up with residents lying in wait in the basement in case a technician turned up, trying to make contact with anyone who would talk with us about what was going wrong. One of our residents was getting maintenance quotes from other companies (we were still within our year of free maintenance).
Finally someone encountered an actual technician and explained how poorly the new lift was performing and he looked beyond the “get it going again” approach and discovered a serious fault with our mother-board, which was replaced (that took three months). Lift has been brilliant ever since.
At the end of our year of free maintenance, we were very reluctant to sign up with that company and suddenly actual humans started to talk to us. We were able to negotiate the pricing and the terms of the standard contract for the first 12 months and we got an exit clause added to allow us to get out of the contract without penalty if the lift continued to behave poorly (which it hasn’t). I now have email and phone contacts for actual people in our lift company.
I worry about the numbers of people moving into apartments in our cities and how many of them are not equipped to manage projects of this size, fight for their rights, negotiate contracts or pay for expensive consultants and lawyers to look after their interests.