Strategic Asset Management

How do you evaluate every square foot of County-owned real estate in Los Angeles?

screenshot of COLA software

The Problem

The County of Los Angeles is *huge:* it's the largest county in the US, and has 10 million residents. On its own, it is equivalent to the 10th largest state in the US. And like everywhere else, it's got infrastructure problems and 'deferred maintenance.' The County needed to evaluate every square foot of real estate, estimate how much it will cost to repair, and make a plan to move forward.

Working with our partners at AECOM, we developed a suite of tools to help the County manage their real estate assets. Every office, library, hospital, park facility, parking lot, and on and on.

That's a lot of buildings to manage.

An App for the Field

We developed an iOS app for building inspectors to assess the condition of every facility, sending in live data about deferred maintenance, building lifecycle data, and equipment aging. Five field teams of 15-30 people have been using this app for years now, steadily working their way across the county landscape. The app is where they record and report on every crack, peel, and register each piece of equipment in every building.

We've expanded it beyond the initial request to just record deficiences - not just things that are broken - but also cover installed equipment, parking lot problems, and overall building health.

field tests
We've done field tests with the assessment team, watching out for usability issues in shipyards, rooftops, and jungles.

And a Platform for everything else

And then the rest of the work starts! We built a web platform from the ground up where data from the field assessments is QA'd, deficiencies are costed, architects build proposed remediation projects, and county staff can create capital plans to cover deferred maintenance in the future.

It’s a powerful set of tools, wrapped in one consistent interface.

screenshot of COLA software

By the numbers

So far, the platform has recorded:

  • 47 MILLION square feet of real estate assessed
  • 65,000 pieces of building equipment
  • 50,000 individual building deficiences
  • and a whole bunch of cost calculations that we can't share.

When considering all the data, design, and work this represents, it makes me incredibly proud to be a part of it. Really, I think for this building science type of work, there's no one else in the world right now with a system like this.

You guys have made something groundbreaking that's also become very reliable and intuitive.

An Actual Client, not An Actor