India has been spending heavily on Infrastructure Construction in recent times. Although important, the focus tends to skew towards new construction, overshadowing proper maintenance and renovation (M&R) of the built infrastructure. Thus, M&R of existing buildings is frequently overlooked, even though it is crucial in ensuring safety, functionality, and longevity. Previous research in this context has focused on understanding factors affecting building maintenance, cost drivers, benchmarking methods, and failure trend analyses. A few studies used text analytics on complaint management system data to identify performance metrics and common failure modes in commercial buildings, while several other studies have developed maintenance models and frameworks that emphasize predictive analytics for improving maintenance quality and reducing operational costs. However, limited works are available that emphasize use of historical work order data to analyze maintenance needs by identify trends in past maintenance activities. The analysis of historical work order data can support validation/testing of maintenance models developed in the literature. To address this gap, this study dives deeper into understanding the M&R of Halls of residence (Hostel buildings) at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IIT Kanpur) to conduct a comprehensive study on asset management for educational buildings. The study leverages an extensive dataset comprising 231,086 maintenance work orders and the associated cost of civil works. This study aims to explore potential trends in maintenance activities by examining the frequency of maintenance and associating it with the building’s cost, occupancy, and age. Civil maintenance works carried out on halls of residence were studied in detail to conduct life-cycle cost analysis. Furthermore, the effect of renovation was studied by comparing the subsequent M&R costs of a renovated hall with that of a similar newly constructed hall. As expected, it was found that the older hall has higher M&R costs than the newer hall. However, this study identified that factors (such as user behaviors, number of occupants, quality of materials, etc.) other than age also play a significant role in determining the frequency of complaints and the overall M&R costs. Lastly, a comparison between a renovated hall and a newly constructed hall suggests that a newly constructed hall incurs a high initial cost but benefits from lower M&R costs, while a renovated hall has a lower initial cost but higher M&R costs. Regardless of the choice, timely M&R is crucial. The study provides insights into the expenses associated with the construction, renovation, and maintenance of new and old buildings and offers maintenance suggestions for halls, contributing valuable data for better asset management in educational institution.