MFor Universities, asset management is about protecting people, education, and history.
With thousands of people moving across campus daily, managing a vast portfolio and scheduling maintenance can be challenging.
Typically traditional inspections, involving rope access, scaffolding and elevated work platforms, can lead to building downtime and also increase liability risks.
Martin Ayres, Head of Strategic Asset Management and University of Sydney:
“We can have 80,000 people here a day, from staff to students, so there is a lot of risk that we need to manage.”
In recent years, leading institutions such as the University of Sydney have adopted Trendspek,to take control of their assets for safer, smarter, and more proactive decision-making.
But why turn to a digital solution in the first place?
Vast portfolios, high risk environments
Typically, a University campus is comprised of a mix of heritage-listed buildings and modern facilities.
With different materials, building ages and degrees of degradation, this means that diagnosing potential issues manually can be a time-consuming process.
Methods such as rope access, cherry pickers and EWPs are typically used for spot or representative inspections, focusing on an area of interest and only covering 20–30% instead of the entire structure. This is usually due to a limited window to take the buildings offline, to minimise impact to the wider community.
While this method supports repairs in the short term, it can prevent strategic longterm asset management due to:
- Safety risks and community disruption: EWPs or rope access in high-traffic campuses increases liability risks, and can take essential buildings offline for extended periods.
- Partial data: Spot checks only cover 20–30% of façades, which can prevent longterm planning or lead to critical gaps in understanding where maintenance is most needed in the future.
- Information can hard to corroborate: Manual reporting takes time to compile and can slow down collaboration. Without centralised data, teams must rely on individual engineering drawings and paper reports, which delay condition assessments and lead to guesstimates with capital forecasting.
The result? Larger backlogs. Higher costs. More reactive maintenance.
⚠️ The cost of waiting? £13.8 billion.
Unfortunately, years of underinvestment have left universities with hard choices and ageing infrastructure.
In the UK, according to the Department for Education and UK National Audit Office, £13.8 billion is the current cost of deferred maintenance across Britain's education estate.
In this report, it stresses that delayed maintenance will increase future costs by 1.5 times in just 2–4 years.
So, what are Universities doing about it?
Why Universities are going digital
The rise of 3D platforms like Trendspek has offered a practical solution for Universities.
Trendspek converts drone-captured photogrammetry, BIM, GIS and photos into engineering-grade 3D models of built assets.
With 80-90% more external coverage and <2mm resolution, this enables full visibility across hard-to-reach areas of buildings and allows engineers to identify, annotate and take risks ahead of time, remotely and safely from their desk.
The outcome of this approach is a living digital portfolio of asset health, which supports the workflows of University asset management teams with:
- Fully remote inspections from any web browser, anywhere in the world
- Enhanced safety and efficiency with a minimised need for physical access or unplanned site shutdowns in heavy pedestrian areas.
- Precise, actionable condition reports with rich details, including measurements (lat/long/elevation), millimetre visualisations of façades, rooftops and hard-to-reach areas, materials and access requirements.
- Built for collaboration, allowing teams to share models with engineers and contractors online to provide full context ahead of remedial works.
- Integrated with FM systems for ongoing tracking and planning, with 24/7 access to a complete health record of each building.
Success Story: The University of Sydney
The University of Sydney used Trendspek to digitally inspect 110 buildings across its Camperdown campus, one of Australia’s most important educational precincts.
Key outcomes included:
- 110 mixed-age buildings transformed into high-fidelity 3D models
- Data used to inform a 25-year asset management roadmap
- Integration with facilities management systems
- Fully templated inspection workflows, repeated across entire asset portfolio
Bill Chant, Senior Engineer - Asset Management & Operations, University of Sydney:
“The result has been long-term use of the data for condition ratings, material-based forecasts, and portfolio-wide risk modelling. With vast options for how the data will be used going forward to manage campus assets.”
Martin Ayres, Head of Strategic Asset Management at University of Sydney:
"Some assets will be recaptured and inspected as often as each year, while others can be inspected every five or even ten years. The data we’ve captured will help guide that program of ongoing work. This tool is helping us manage risk, and feeds nicely into our shift from reactive to proactive asset management."
sWant to see how it could work for your campus?
Trendspek supports leading universities globally with better data, safer outcomes, and smarter decisions.
Chat with Fiona from our team, she can walk you through how other universities are setting up their workflows.
