Maintenance requests are one of the most time-intensive processes property managers face. Property managers spend around 25 percent of their time communicating about, scheduling, and organizing maintenance work. Slow maintenance work is one of the top complaints among tenants and a major factor that undermines a property manager’s brand reputation. 

At the same time, property managers are drowning in maintenance paperwork for everything from maintenance requests to contractor invoices. These processes become slowed down by misplaced or damaged paperwork that cause delays to jobs. 

While navigating this process, property staff have to keep switching between different systems to receive maintenance requests, communicate with tenants, and communicate with contractors. Once contractors are in the field, getting real time updates causes further complications and at times, delays. 

Finally, tenants become frustrated because they’re not kept in the loop. If unexpected maintenance issues arise, it’s difficult for head office staff to dispatch or re-direct a technician because they don’t have a bird’s-eye view of who’s where. 

How can technology help with the maintenance management challenges property managers face?

Maintenance request coordination

With a cloud-based property management application, staff can easily schedule and coordinate technicians for maintenance requests. They can add updates and information to the same place giving everyone, including the technician and the tenant, a clear overview of the process similar to the track-and-trace information consumers receive for a package they’ve ordered. This kind of system helps with emergencies as well. If there’s a sudden leak at a building, a coordinator can look at the system, see that there’s a plumber working at a site less than 10 kilometres away, and direct that employee to visit the emergency site once they finish their current job. 

Downtime management & predictive maintenance

Experiencing an unusually slow month for maintenance requests? You can use this time to do some preventive maintenance. Your system can give you an overview of who’s available and which units could do with some extra attention. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. 

Contractor payments

Property managers work with several vendors to satisfy their maintenance requests. An easy-to-use system makes it simple to pay vendors on time without dedicating outrageous hours to the task of parsing, verifying, and entering invoice data. 

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Find out how you can leverage technology to streamline the maintenance process and more in "The Profitable Property Manager." Download your copy now.