A capex plan written for one year is a shopping list. A capex plan written for ten years is a fantasy. The 3-year rolling plan is the operating horizon that owners and asset managers actually work with — long enough to see the consequences of deferral, short enough to be defensible against real numbers. Every quarter you re-baseline, drop year 1 into committed, and add a new year 3.
What goes in each year
Year 1 is committed work. Items in year 1 have a signed scope, a procurement track in motion, a vendor identified or tendered, and a cash-flow profile by month. The owner approval for year 1 happens 90 days before the calendar year begins. Year 1 surprises in March mean somebody failed at the year-before planning cycle.
Year 2 is planned but not committed. Items have a scope, a budget range (±15%), and a preferred quarter. Vendors are not yet selected. The plan can flex if year 1 over-runs, or if year 1 leaves money on the table that should roll forward. Year 2 is where the owner expects to see strategy — what is the property prioritising, what is the sequence of investments, why now.
Year 3 is directional. Items have a description and an order-of-magnitude cost (±30%). The plan exists so that the owner can model multi-year debt service coverage, FF&E reserve adequacy, and the cumulative capital need across their portfolio. Year 3 will change. It is supposed to.
The quarterly re-baseline
Every quarter the plan moves forward one quarter. Items in Q1 of year 1 close out (complete, deferred, or re-scoped). New items appear at the far end of year 3. The exercise is non-trivial — it forces the GM and the asset manager to talk about what changed in the quarter, what happened in the market that affects the plan, and what the property learned from the work that just closed.
What I have learned to put in writing
What the rolling plan replaces
It replaces the annual "wish list" memo most GMs send to ownership in October — usually 14-22 items with no sequencing, no funding analysis, and no narrative for why this year and not next. The owner either approves a fraction at random or defers everything to "let us think about it," and the property limps another year on deferred capex. The rolling plan prevents that conversation from happening because the conversation already happened last quarter.