Rafeeg App enters the Commercial Building Maintenance Market

The first Emirati App, “Rafeeg” achieved great success by launching its new updates, which will add significant value to the platform’s existing services. The new feature called “Commercial Buildings Services” is in line with Abu Dhabi’s Government vision and municipality law issued early January 2020. 

The Abu Dhabi Municipality framework “Preventive maintenance system” launched in 2018 aims to maintain the buildings’ sustainability, raise the efficiency and control the maintenance procedures, and the quality of life. This law applied to 215 old buildings within the city. 

Such an update within “Rafeeg App” derives from ending the landlords’ endurance, empowering them to network with more than 1,000 licensed specialized maintenance service providers to overcome such obstacles and challenges. It assists landlords with essential smart solutions, enabling them to supervise the facility management and remotely oversee the maintenance procedures. This solution leads to cutting expenses and ensuring sustainable actions to protect both consumers and the building facilities. 

This development is part of the Rafeeg app continuance commitment to provide building maintenance smart solutions, where the App has managed over the past few years to serve more than 70,000 homeowners as well as improving the maintenance quality and helping homeowners to rationalize their expenses. 

Khamis Al-Sheryani, the founder of the App, said, “The Rafeeg new update allows landlords to manage their tenants’ and building facilities without contracting with a maintenance company or third party. Additionally, the App provides landlords with live data, financials, and technical analysis reports to keep track and awareness of the tenants and building facilities status”. 

This new feature will allow the landlords to connect with their tenants and the service providers, allowing them to get the most competitive prices—less than the market price without all those hidden fees. This will lead to rationalizing their maintenance operations through a Pay as you go system. 

Al-Sheryani added, “In addition to this feature, “Rafeeg” offers its customers direct support from experts within different sectors and fields such as Project Managers, who will be managing their projects and do the site-check of their facilities and report it directly to the owners.” 

Such development within the App is a fundamental solution that bridges the gap between landlords and the maintenance companies (service providers). This historical gap is due to the difference of interest between both landlords and service providers. While the second is looking for the assets for a short time, limited to the contract (usually 3 years), the landlords are looking for these assets in the long run, which might exceed ten years. As most of the maintenance issues will arise after these 3 years—the owners are the ones that will face these challenges and problems alone. 

To overcome this, “Rafeeg App” provides a dashboard that gathers all the data and information about the asset’s conditions, which will enable the owners more flexibility to access, retrieve and review detailed information to take actions or change plans within a press of a button. Thus, the update will improve the landlords’ work and reduce their time and effort by up to 90% compared to the traditional ways. According to recent studies by the App, more than 1,000 building owners will benefit from these services within the first year of launch.

The “Occupancy Certificate” applied to Abu Dhabi city includes the construction structure of the building, water and sewage installations, ventilation and air conditions, electrical connection, stairs safety, outside appearance of the building, and children’s lock (windows and balconies protections). 

Finally, Al-Sheryani stressed that “As the municipality confirmed, the importance of such rule “Preventive Maintenance” issued by the Abu Dhabi Municipality, is the execution work, which is a collaborative responsibility between both landlords or facility managers and contractors as each one has specific duties towards these implementations.” Abu Dhabi Municipality indicated that applying for the “Occupancy Certificate” is through utilizing a unified electronic system for building permits MEPs. Owners of the property also can assign either a consultant or engineering contractor who can upload the required documents to the system, and these will be checked by the concerned department who will also do a site inspection, before submitting the reports for approval and final issuance of the certificate.