ASTM E2018-15: The PCA Standard That Governed for Nine Years

What the 2015 edition set out

E2018-15 established the walk-through survey format that commercial real estate came to rely on: a document review, an interview with people who know the property, a visual survey of the building systems, and a report identifying material physical deficiencies with opinions of probable cost.

It also set the expectation of a baseline scope that a lender could rely on without negotiating the contents each time. That standardization is the reason PCA reports from different consultants look broadly alike.

Where it fell short

The 2015 edition was written primarily around the transaction. It said comparatively little about what the person commissioning the report actually needed the report for. A purchaser holding for ten years, a lender underwriting five, and an owner planning capital works have different questions, and the standard treated them much the same.

It also left the boundary between a material physical deficiency and routine maintenance less defined than practitioners would have liked, which produced arguments about what belonged in the cost tables.

Why this still matters

Older reports remain in circulation, attached to files and refinancing packages. A report prepared to E2018-15 is not wrong — it was correct when written — but it reflects a different scope discipline than one prepared to the current edition.

If you are relying on a PCA prepared some years ago, check the edition cited and the date. Building conditions change, and so has the standard: E2018-24 replaced this edition on 1 January 2024 with more than 140 changes.