Before any conversation about products, schedule or price, there is one question: where will the crew be suspended from? The answer is on the roof, not in an office.
What an anchor point is
An element fixed into the building's structure and designed to carry the load of a person and their rope. Not any pipe, not an air-conditioning base, not the roof parapet. Those are exactly what gets used instead on buildings that have no real anchors.
What gets checked
- Whether they exist, how many, and how they are distributed around the roof.
- Their condition: corrosion, movement, cracking in the concrete around them.
- Whether they cover every elevation or only some.
- Any previous inspection record, if building management holds one.
If there are no anchor points
This is common in older buildings and it is not the end of the conversation. The alternatives include counterweight systems on the roof, access from lifts where the ground allows, or installing permanent anchors as a separate piece of work that pays the building back every time it needs anything done outside.
Why it matters to a building manager
Because anchor points are a building asset in the way a lift is. Their condition gets checked and recorded, and their absence raises the cost of every external job on that building permanently, not once.
The question to ask
Ask any contractor whether they went up to the roof before writing the proposal. Anyone who did not has priced a guess about what is up there.