How to run a lift maintenance tender in Australia.

Most lift maintenance contracts in Australia are signed once and quietly renewed for years. The lifts keep running, the invoices keep coming, and the agreement is rarely tested against the market. Yet lift maintenance is one of a building's larger recurring costs — and one of the few where the owner depends almost entirely on the contractor's own word about what was done.

Running a proper tender changes that. Done well, it gives you comparable pricing, a clear scope, and a contractor held to a written standard. Done badly — over email, on a single page of pricing — it produces an agreement that's impossible to compare and hard to enforce. This guide covers how to run a lift maintenance tender in Australia: when to do it, what to prepare, the process, and the mistakes that cost owners the most.

When should you tender lift maintenance?

• Your contract is expiring — or rolls over automatically (check the notice period now).
• Performance has slipped — recurring breakdowns, slow callouts, or shutdowns you hear about from tenants first.
• You've never tested it — if the contract pre-dates your ownership or hasn't been to market in 3–5 years, it isn't market-tested.
• Your portfolio has changed — new buildings, modernisations, or a push to standardise terms across sites.

As a rule of thumb, a maintenance agreement that hasn't been tendered in five years is worth taking to market.

What you need before you start

1. A complete asset register — every lift, escalator and moving walk: make, model, age, rise, speed, controller type. Every contractor prices against this.
2. Your current scope and performance — existing terms, what's actually delivered, and any shutdown or callout history.
3. A clear service specification — the standard you expect, often a Minimum Service Delivery Threshold (MSDT): visit frequency, response times, and what's included versus charged extra.

Get the asset register right and the rest follows. Get it wrong and you'll be comparing quotes that priced different things.

The steps to run a lift maintenance tender

1. Build the asset register — the single most important input.
2. Define the scope — set the specification and MSDT so everyone prices the same obligations.
3. Prepare the conditions of tender — close date, site-walk, submission format and assessment basis, set before release so the process is defensible.
4. Release to qualified contractors — a shortlist of capable, licensed bidders. Three or four serious tenderers beats a dozen box-tickers.
5. Manage clarifications — track legal and technical questions in one register, and share answers with all tenderers so everyone bids on the same information.
6. Assess like-for-like — compare on price, scope, exclusions and capability, not just the headline number. The cheapest quote with the biggest exclusions is rarely the cheapest contract.
7. Collate and execute — fold the agreed legal terms and the maintenance specification into one agreement, ready to sign.

The mistakes that cost owners the most

• Comparing apples to oranges — without a shared asset register and scope, quotes aren't comparable.
• No audit trail — if you can't show what each contractor was asked and promised, you can't hold them to it.
• Scope gaps — "comprehensive" and "preventive only" are very different contracts.
• Single-source renewals — rolling over without testing the market is how overpriced contracts persist for a decade.

How long does it take — and what does it cost?

A well-run tender takes around ten weeks from release to commencement. The cost is your time to prepare and assess — or a fixed fee to have it run for you. The bigger number is the contract itself: getting the tender right usually saves far more than it costs.

The structured way to do it

Running a tender properly is mostly about structure: the same asset register for everyone, a recorded clarification process, and a like-for-like assessment with an audit trail behind the decision.

That's exactly what MAPLE Ascent's maintenance tender service does — you complete your asset register online, the tender is prepared and released to qualified contractors, clarifications and lodgement run inside a secure Tender Box with every step recorded, and your agreement is collated ready to execute. It's a fair, even-handed process — every tenderer assessed on the same basis — and because MAPLE Ascent knows the market and the contractors in it, the advice reflects where each is genuinely strong.