The challenge
The Howard Centre is a multi-tenant retail destination adjacent to Welwyn Garden City railway station. Savills, as managing agent, needed a current condition assessment of the external building envelope to inform planned maintenance and support the service charge budget.
Sections of the building had never been properly inspected because of access limitations. Traditional methods would have meant scaffolding across a live retail centre, disruption to tenants and shoppers, and weeks of site presence. The centre also sits within Network Rail controlled airspace, adding a coordination layer that traditional approaches would not resolve.
What Ovrsite delivered
Ovrsite captured 237 waypoints across the full external envelope in a single visit lasting under two hours. The inspection was completed while the centre traded normally. Zero scaffolding, zero tenant disruption, zero closures. Network Rail airspace approval was obtained in advance by Ovrsite's operations team.
AI-assisted analysis produced a complete, graded condition record of the building envelope, including areas that had never been formally inspected. Every finding was geolocated, photographed, and prioritised, giving Savills an evidence base they had never previously had for this property.
The result
Savills received a full building envelope condition record covering areas that were previously invisible to their maintenance planning. The data gave the managing agent a defensible, evidence-led basis for the service charge budget submission and forward maintenance programme.
The same data now sits in Atlas as a dated, auditable baseline, ready for comparison when the next inspection cycle runs. What would have taken weeks with scaffolding was completed in a single morning.
“It gave a great insight and fantastic detail of areas that had not been visible for us to see.”