Routine building inspections, preventive maintenance and a good management team all contribute to keeping a hotel in good working condition.

As the world follows the developing story of what led to the condominium collapse at Champlain Towers South in Surfside, Florida, hoteliers and other real estate and building professionals might be reevaluating their maintenance, repairs and renovation plans.

Jim Butler, founding partner and chairman of the global hospitality group law firm at Jeffer Mangels Butler & Mitchell, said the condo collapse was a "rare and disastrous confluence of events."

"We will still be sifting through the debris and the facts months from now, maybe even a year from now, but culprits for causing the problem are design ... it could have been construction," he said, adding that maybe sub-grade materials were used.

There also could have been bad vendors or inspectors who overlooked issues, Butler said.

Maintenance is critical to the life of any building, and hoteliers do a good job of keeping up with preventive maintenance because most hotels have experienced management teams, Butler said.

"They have systems, they have checklists, and they aren't hampered by a homeowners association," he said.

The condo's homeowners association potentially could be a contributing issue with the collapse, he said.

An HOA is "a committee of homeowners, so they are not professionals," Butler said. "These are people who have full-time jobs, and the job isn't property management."

Butler said HOA committees don't have those checklists, they meet usually once a month and "they are worried about Mrs. Jones running her sprinklers at the wrong hours."

They also have a funding problem, because they suffer from financial limitations. With homeowners having to pay maintenance dues, ongoing security, etc., they don't want to pay for additional repairs a lot of times or vote to wait on completing repairs, he said.

While management teams have done well when inspecting hotel units, hotels built with condo units as part of the development can be a gray area, Butler said.

Each condo unit is owned by an individual owner, so while the hotel could be following regular inspections and making repairs, the attached condo units might not be.

"You usually do have your professional operator as the manager of the condo hotel association, but that isn't required," he said. "That's what the brands may require in order to put their ... brand behind [condo units], and there is a great deal of comfort that people get from the brands."

The condo managers need to live up to the brand standards and "be prudent, not silly ... it's about the integrity of the operation," he said.

Kevin DeMark, senior national director of facilities for OTO Development, said his company uses a software platform to track building inspections across the portfolio of hotels it operates.

Hotel teams perform preventive maintenance in the guest rooms, building and systems on a daily basis, he said. They also have weekly meetings between general managers and engineers to discuss rounds and readings, potential capital projects, capital expenditures and energy management.

OTO also has a regional director of facilities who travels around to each property once a year to make sure hotels are keeping up on preventive maintenance, DeMark said.

The company uses another piece of software to keep track of events and how they were handled from a maintenance perspective. For example, a hurricane recently affected OTO properties from Key West to the New York area, DeMark said.

The software keeps track of inspections, and when executives visit a property, they "have a snapshot in time of what's going on at the hotel, which we can then report to our general manager and regional director of operations to provide as much detail as possible to what we're seeing from a facilities perspective."

That makes it easier to follow up with each hotel on action items to make sure they have been completed or are in the works, he said.

During the construction of a hotel, building inspections take place on a "fairly consistent basis depending on the stage of a project," Carl Hren, senior vice president of development at Concord Hospitality Enterprises, said in an email interview.

"For example, once the building is dried in, it would be normal for a building inspector to walk the project on a daily or every-other-day basis," he said. "Between electrical, mechanical, fire protection, building inspections and others happening on different floors or areas as the project progresses, multiple inspectors could even be on-site during the same day.

"Inspections would not necessarily be more or less frequent based on what the building is exposed to; rather, the inspections themselves could be much more intense based on the location and ... requirements."

For multiuse buildings, Hren said inspections are done the same way as a traditional hotel, but they are more complex because of the different uses.

"Inspections are usually broken up into different parts of the building, floors, etc.," he said.