From Heatwave to Heavy Rain: Is Your Estate Ready for What Comes Next?

Summer 2026 officially entered the record books as the UK’s hottest on record.

The Met Office recorded an average UK summer temperature of 16.5°C, surpassing the previous record set only last year. England, Wales and Northern Ireland all experienced their warmest summers on record, while prolonged heat and unusually dry conditions placed additional pressure on buildings, infrastructure and water resources.

Dr Amy Doherty of the Met Office summed it up simply:

“The conditions we’ve seen this summer have broken UK climate records once again.”

But summer is now behind us.

For Facilities and Estates teams, attention quickly moves from overheating, cooling and water use towards a very different set of challenges: heavier rainfall, blocked drainage, flooding, strong winds, ageing roofs and keeping sites operational through the colder months.

It raises an important question:

How well do you really know your estate?

From reactive maintenance to estate resilience

Extreme weather has traditionally been treated as something exceptional – an issue for emergency plans rather than day-to-day estate management.

That thinking is changing.

Writing about the issue this September, Che McKenna, Head of Technical Operations at Jones FM, described climate resilience as having moved from a future consideration to:

“an immediate operational mandate.”

The challenge is no longer simply responding when something goes wrong.

It is understanding where the vulnerabilities are before they become operational problems.

That applies whether you manage a school, hospital, commercial estate, manufacturing facility, office portfolio or public building.

Where does the surface water actually drain?

What condition are the underground drainage runs in?

Do existing drawings accurately reflect the building today?

Where are the underground utilities?

Have alterations been made over the years that were never properly recorded?

What information would you need tomorrow if a refurbishment, repair or emergency intervention suddenly became necessary?

For many estates, the answers are spread across historic drawings, spreadsheets, old reports, individual contractors and the knowledge of long-serving members of staff.

And sometimes, nobody knows for certain.

Better information makes estates more resilient

This is becoming an increasingly prominent issue across the property sector.

A September RICS article highlighted how building information is still frequently dispersed between physical records, spreadsheets, emails, site visits and disconnected systems. It argues that poor-quality information limits how effectively buildings can be understood, managed, upgraded and maintained.

That is an important distinction.

Estate resilience doesn’t necessarily mean replacing everything.

It starts with knowing what you have.

Graham King, Director at Terrain Surveys, explains:

“You can’t make good decisions about an estate if you’re working from incomplete or outdated information. Before you decide what needs repairing, upgrading or replacing, you need a reliable picture of what is actually there.”

That might mean understanding the building itself through measured surveys and 3D laser scanning.

It could mean mapping underground utilities before excavation or redevelopment work begins.

Or it could mean investigating a drainage network before the first prolonged spell of heavy rainfall exposes a problem.

Different disciplines, but ultimately the same objective:

reducing uncertainty.

A lesson from below ground

A recent Terrain project at a school in Harrow demonstrates the point particularly well.

With the site quieter during the summer holidays, our CCTV drainage team was commissioned to build a comprehensive picture of the school’s below-ground drainage network.

Using CCTV inspection and electronic line tracing, the team established drainage routing and connectivity, located concealed infrastructure where practicable and assessed the condition, capacity and operational performance of the network.

The resulting information gives the estates team something considerably more useful than simply CCTV footage.

It provides a reliable record that can support future maintenance, modifications, redevelopment and longer-term asset management.

And importantly, the work was carried out proactively while disruption could be minimised – rather than following a drainage failure during a busy school term.

As Graham puts it:

“The best time to understand your drainage isn’t when water is already backing up into a building. If you know the network, its condition and where the problems are, you have far more options.”

Existing buildings present the same challenge

The principle applies above ground too.

At the former House of Fraser unit at Bluewater Shopping Centre, Terrain was asked to create an accurate digital record of the building following strip-out and while demolition work was still taking place.

Our team used 3D laser scanning to capture the existing structural environment, including steelwork, walls, floors, columns and building services. The resulting point cloud was used to create a detailed Revit model for future planning and redevelopment.

Again, the value wasn’t simply in producing a model.

It was about giving the project team an accurate understanding of what existed at that point in time, so the next design and redevelopment decisions could be made from reliable information.

Two very different projects – a school drainage network and a stripped-out commercial building – but the underlying problem is remarkably similar.

Before you can decide what comes next, you need to understand what you’ve already got.

One estate rarely means one survey

This is also where a more joined-up approach to surveying becomes increasingly valuable.

An Estates Manager planning a refurbishment might initially require a measured building survey.

But the project may subsequently need topographical information.

Then utility mapping.

Then a drainage investigation.

Then a Revit model.

If each requirement is treated separately, an organisation can find itself managing multiple suppliers, separate visits and different datasets – all describing different parts of the same site.

Terrain’s consultancy-led approach is deliberately different.

Our teams cover Measured Building Surveys, Topographical Surveys, PAS128 Utility Mapping, CCTV Drainage Surveys, 3D Laser Scanning and Revit/BIM modelling, allowing different requirements to be coordinated through one surveying partner.

Graham explains:

“For an estates team, the benefit isn’t simply that we offer several different surveys. It’s that we’re looking at the same building or site as one asset. The building, the land, the utilities and the drainage all interact.”

That joined-up picture can be particularly valuable when organisations are responsible for multiple buildings, busy operational sites or ageing estates where historic information is incomplete.

Resilience is becoming a year-round issue

The scale of the challenge is also becoming clearer at national level.

This month, more than £1.5 billion was announced for over 950 NHS estate projects, including £1.3 billion specifically targeting maintenance, safety and resilience. Investment includes cooling and ventilation improvements after this summer’s extreme heat, while future schemes are also expected to consider resilience to flooding.

Sir Ciarán Devane, Chief Executive of the NHS Alliance, said:

“The summer heatwaves showed up the poor condition of many NHS buildings.”

It illustrates a wider point.

Preparing an estate for the future can no longer mean preparing for one particular season.

Buildings may need to cope with extreme heat in August and prolonged rainfall only weeks later.

For Facilities and Estates teams, resilience increasingly means understanding how buildings and infrastructure perform throughout the year – and identifying vulnerabilities before external conditions expose them.

Start with what you know – and what you don’t

Nobody can predict every future maintenance problem.

And no survey can eliminate every risk.

But accurate information puts estates teams in a much stronger position to make decisions.

Knowing where services run, understanding drainage connectivity and condition, having accurate building records and maintaining reliable site information all reduce the number of unknowns when something changes.

That change might be a refurbishment.

It might be expansion.

It might be extreme weather.

Or it might simply be an ageing asset reaching the point where intervention is required.

As Graham King concludes:

“Good estate management is ultimately about making informed decisions. Our role is to give clients the clearest possible picture of their buildings and sites, so they can act proactively rather than waiting for a problem to tell them something is wrong.”

After the hottest summer on record, autumn is a timely reminder that the pressures facing our buildings can change remarkably quickly.

The weather may be unpredictable. Your understanding of your estate doesn’t have to be.