Nothing is better than taking time off to relax with family and friends during the holidays. However, it is hard to enjoy your vacation when all you can think about is the work orders piling up in your absence.
Handling maintenance during the holiday months can be highly overwhelming to property managers. In fact, during a single holiday weekend, you can expect your residents to submit 153.9% more work orders. If you are out of the office for an extended period without a proper system, this could lead to a colossal holiday backlog when you return. With this backlog comes employee burnout, increased repair speeds, and unsatisfied residents. Your Holiday Cheer will turn to “holiday fear” real quick.
Automate the Holiday Workload to Avoid Holiday Backlog
On average, maintenance coordinators can expect 40% of their company’s door count to submit maintenance requests every month. So if your property management company manages 500 units, you can expect at least 200 work orders every month. Now imagine that each maintenance request takes five minutes to schedule (in reality, it is probably much higher). It would take a maintenance coordinator over 16 hours to organize these requests. That is without any follow-up, and if everything runs smoothly, which, believe us, doesn’t happen. Factor in a couple of vacation days for the holidays; it could take weeks to get caught up!
With dedicated maintenance software, you can automate the mundane tasks to avoid holiday backlog, increasing the average repair time and, in turn, improving your resident satisfaction.
1: Set up Automated Triage Instructions
Property managers and maintenance coordinators spend much time dealing with mundane, repetitive tasks. According to recent data, workers spend about 520 hours a year on repetitive tasks, which equates to a little over three months. By setting up automatic maintenance triage instructions, you can have messages send automatically when specific keywords are used in a maintenance request. For example, suppose one of your residents submits a request for an issue with their garbage disposal. In that case, an automated message will initiate with instructions on how they can solve the problem themselves. If the issue persists, you can send a technician to check it out. With automated triage, you can avoid sending a technician when it is unnecessary. According to our data, customers using our maintenance software have been able to solve 1 in 6 work orders without ever sending a technician, saving time and money!
2: Automatically Follow Up With Residents
One of the most significant pain points in the maintenance process is confirming whether or not the work is complete. Sometimes, a vendor may forget to mark a work order finished. More commonly, we hear that busy workloads take priority over following up with a resident to ensure their repair was completed. This lapse in communication can make your residents feel underappreciated and frustrated with your maintenance process. With automation, you can send automatic follow-up surveys to your residents as soon as an internal technician or third-party vendor completes their maintenance request. Your resident will automatically receive messaging asking them to confirm the completion. This is an easy way to ensure you are staying on top of things and making your residents feel valued, leading to higher resident satisfaction and improving your renewal rates.
3: See Important KPI’s In One Place
As a property manager, to keep your owners happy, you have to show them that you are improving their bottom line while taking care of their assets. With a maintenance dashboard, you can see important business metrics that matter to your owners in one place. Since maintenance is one of the most significant costs associated with managing rental properties, keeping track of these performance indicators is a great way to determine if your maintenance process is successful. When your owners ask you for data, you won’t have to go digging or start crunching numbers. Keeping your owners in the loop will help them feel at ease knowing you have a handle on things. With automated maintenance software, you can see key metrics like the average repair time, resident satisfaction rating, and much more. Automating your maintenance process can improve these metrics, keeping residents and owners happy! In fact, one of our customers has seen their average speed of repairs increase by 46% since using dedicated maintenance software.
Automating your maintenance process allows your team to take some much-needed time off during the holidays without worrying about the mess that awaits when you return. By eliminating holiday backlog, you will create a better maintenance experience for your residents and avoid employee burnout!
Request a demo with one of our maintenance experts to learn more about automating your maintenance process!
