Switchover day: four regimes change state at once

Acceptance has been treated four times in this course: for its date, for its reservations, for what it purges, for the statutory warranties it triggers. What remains is to look at it as practitioners live it, that is, as the one moment when several contracts cross on the same day. In the morning, the works are a construction site covered by a single policy; in the evening, they are an operated asset covered by a property policy, protected by three statutory warranties, and followed by a maintenance period. Four regimes change state on one signature, and nobody is charged with checking that they interlock.

The first interlock is between the construction policy and the operating policy. The first ceases on the accepted part, the second must take over, and nothing synchronizes them automatically: the operating policy is bought on a forecast date, decided months earlier, and actual acceptance happens when it happens. A three-week gap between the two creates an interval where the works are no longer a site and not yet an insured asset, and it is the same mechanism described in the module on inception, applied at the project's other end.

The second interlock is the maintenance period, which starts at acceptance and whose three forms the corresponding module showed. Its peculiarity here is that it does not cover the accepted works generally: it covers, depending on its form, what the contractor breaks on returning, or what appears and arises from the execution. It is therefore not an extension of the construction policy, and believing otherwise leads to not buying an operating policy in time, which is that day's most frequent error.

The third interlock is the statutory warranties, which also start, and which are not insurance but liabilities. The module devoted to them showed that they fall on the builders and not on an insurer; what makes them insurable is another contract, the builders' ten-year liability cover, bought well before and whose validity on the day the site opened is what counts, not on the day of acceptance. That precision is ignored almost everywhere: a certificate valid at acceptance proves nothing if cover was not valid at opening.

The fourth thing that changes that day is not a contract but a state: the works pass from the contractor's custody to the project owner's. The module on ownership and risk showed that the burden of risk switches at acceptance; it must be added that physical custody switches too, and with it liability for things in one's keeping. Accepted works that injure somebody the next day engage their keeper, and the keeper changed the previous evening with nobody having moved a fence or removed a sign.

Those four switches share a property that explains why they are missed: they occur on a date that is not the one assumed. Acceptance is often recorded late, sometimes tacitly as the module on the date showed, and the minute may be signed weeks after the fact it records. Yet the four regimes follow the date of acceptance, not that of the signature. Works can therefore have changed hands, custody, regime and insurer three weeks before the first document says so, and that is exactly the interval where losses lodge.

What must be done is a four-line list, prepared before the acceptance walkdown and not after. Does the operating policy attach on the actual acceptance date, whatever it is, or on a fixed date. Does the maintenance period cover what it is believed to cover. Were the builders' ten-year liability certificates valid at the OPENING of the site. And has custody been formally transferred, with keys, instructions and access. Four checks, half a day, and they cannot be caught up afterwards: acceptance day is the one day of the project when four regimes change state at once.