How to Choose a Facility Management Company in Riyadh

Choosing a facility management company in Riyadh is a decision an owner lives with for years. The company you appoint will hold the keys to your plant rooms, deal with your tenants every day and spend a large share of your operating budget. This guide sets out what to prepare, what to ask and what to check before you sign, whether you own a multi-tenant office building or run a corporate headquarters.

Start with your building, not with the provider

Before you speak to any facility management company, write down what your building needs. A provider can only plan and price what you describe.

Prepare four things:

• A list of the main systems and equipment in the building, with their age and condition where you know them.
• The services you want covered: maintenance only, or cleaning, security and hospitality as well.
• The operating hours, and the areas where a failure cannot be tolerated, such as a server room or the main entrance.
• The problems you have today: repeated faults, tenant complaints, costs you cannot explain.

A company that asks for this information, and asks to walk the building before it prices, is showing you how it will work once appointed.

Eight questions to ask a facility management company

1. Who will do the work? Ask which services the company delivers with its own employees and which it passes to subcontractors. For specialist systems such as lifts, the manufacturer usually maintains the equipment. What matters is that one party stays responsible to you for all of it.

2. How is maintenance planned? Ask which standard the planned preventive maintenance follows, and ask to see a sample schedule for a building like yours. A schedule built on a recognised standard such as SFG20 and on the manufacturers’ instructions means each asset is maintained at a set frequency, with defined tasks, by the right trade.

3. How are requests received and followed? Ask whether there is a helpdesk, during which hours, and how a tenant raises a request. Ask how priorities are set, and how you will know that a job was closed.

4. Which system records the work? A facility management company should run its work on a CAFM system. Ask for a live demonstration. You should see a work order from the first call to the sign-off, with the time, the technician and the photos.

5. What will I receive every month? Ask for a sample monthly report. It should show planned maintenance completed against the schedule, service levels met and missed, open issues and recommendations.

6. Who will manage my building? Meet the facility manager proposed for your building. Ask how often that person will be on site and who covers during leave.

7. How do you take over a building? Ask for the mobilisation plan: the asset survey, the records to be collected from the current contractor, the team and the first maintenance schedule.

8. How do you manage health and safety? Ask about permits to work, training and incident reporting. The answer should be a working procedure with records behind it.

What a good proposal shows

Read the proposal against the list you prepared. Each part should answer a clear question.

If one of these parts is missing, ask for it before you discuss price.

Ask to see it working

A presentation tells you what a company intends to do. Evidence tells you what it does.

Ask to see closed work orders on the company’s system, with the checklist and the sign-off. Ask to see a planned maintenance schedule and the record of visits completed against it. Walk your own building with the team that would run it, and listen to the questions they ask. People who understand buildings ask about the age of the chillers, the fire system records and access to the roof before they talk about price.

Common mistakes when appointing a provider

• Deciding on the monthly price alone. A low price built on a thin scope returns later as variations, or as maintenance that is never done.
• Leaving the scope vague. “Full maintenance” means different things to different people. List the systems.
• Accepting reports that cannot be checked. A figure in a report is only useful if you can open the work orders behind it.
• Starting without a handover. A new provider that begins without an asset survey inherits problems nobody has recorded.
• Dividing related services between too many contractors. When maintenance, cleaning and security each report separately, no one owns the result. Integrated facility management puts them under one contract, one team and one report.

How we work at NAI Saudi Arabia

Our facility management service is built around the questions above. Every request, work order, inspection and asset is recorded on our platform, with the photo, the checklist and the sign-off, so you can see the work for yourself. Our planned maintenance is in line with SFG20. Our 24/7 FM helpdesk logs, prioritises and follows every request to completion, and our CAFM system puts every work order, asset and inspection in one place.

Your building has its own FM manager, and we meet you monthly to review performance, open issues and recommendations. We deliver our core services with our own teams. For specialist systems such as lifts, we manage the original manufacturers on your behalf, so you deal with one partner.

About NAI Saudi Arabia

NAI Saudi Arabia is a leading total facilities management (TFM) and property management company in Saudi Arabia, and part of NAI Global, one of the world’s largest real estate services companies, with 350 offices, more than 45 years of experience and more than 102 million sqm of property under management for owners, occupiers and investors.

In Saudi Arabia, we have grown since 2024 to manage more than 250,000 sqm across 25+ commercial assets in Riyadh and Jeddah, for corporate occupiers, developers and financial institutions. We deliver hard services, soft services, specialist maintenance and property management, combining in-depth knowledge of the Saudi market with global expertise, so our clients receive services delivered to a consistently high standard.