Preventive vs reactive maintenance

The difference in plain terms

Preventive maintenance is anything you put on a calendar before trouble starts: a roof check every spring, a septic inspection every couple of years, a filter swap every quarter. Reactive maintenance is anything that shows up uninvited: a leak, a stuck door, a resident complaint that turns into an emergency work order.

The trade association APPA frames this same gap from the other direction, as maintenance that quietly slipped from the first category into the second.

"Preventive, predictive, or corrective maintenance that assets and systems should have undergone but have not yet done so."

Source: Deferred Capital Renewal and Deferred Maintenance, APPA

That gap has its own name and its own lesson: deferred maintenance.

Why the choice shows up in the budget, not just the calendar

Postponing a scheduled inspection does not make the underlying problem go away, it just moves the discovery point later, usually to the moment something breaks in front of an owner. APPA links deferred maintenance directly to fiscal instability, loss of facility use, and interruptions to normal association activity, and notes that deferred conditions can let moisture into a building's envelope long before anyone sees a visible sign of damage.

Reactive repairs also tend to arrive at the worst possible time: after hours, during a holiday weekend, or as an emergency work order that skips the competitive bidding a scheduled project would have gotten. None of that is a law, it is simply what happens when the first opportunity to catch a problem cheaply has already passed.

What preventive maintenance actually looks like

Different components run on different clocks, but the pattern is the same: a schedule set before failure, not a response after it.

• Roofs are commonly inspected twice a year, in spring and fall, plus after any severe storm, per trade guidance describing NRCA recommendations. This is industry practice, not a code requirement, so confirm actual frequency with your roofing contractor.
• Asphalt is typically sealcoated on a roughly two to three year cycle, with separate crack sealing starting as early as year two, according to paving trade sources. Climate and traffic change these intervals significantly.
• Septic tanks should be inspected every 1 to 3 years and pumped every 3 to 5 years, per EPA guidance, a shorter cycle for inspection than for pumping.

None of these examples require a crisis to trigger action. That is the entire test: if the work happens because a date arrived, it is preventive; if it happens because something already failed, it is reactive.