Property management companies find maintenance to be the budget item with the lowest level of optimization but the highest degree of controllability. This means if done right, maintenance can substantially impact your bottom line and your organization. However, we discover that many property management companies are choosing other priorities rather than investing in software like Property Meld a property maintenance solution.
Without optimizing maintenance processes, many property management companies continue to handle maintenance manually. While these manual methods get the job done, they are inefficient and can result in human error. Allocating resources to a specialized property maintenance software solution can result in time and cost savings, along with enhancing the overall resident experience.
Some property management software (PMS) typically have a maintenance feature. But when you are dealing with one of the most unpredictable aspects of property management, wouldn’t you want a tool primarily focusing on predictable outcomes in the maintenance process?
Property Meld is solely dedicated to providing our customers with a new standard of property maintenance. From resident submission to follow-up and everything in between, we “Meld” all key players involved in the maintenance process. Our data illuminates inefficiency in your strategy to solve for potential drag while helping property managers tackle the biggest maintenance challenges they face: communication, scheduling, staff efficiency, resident satisfaction, and owner retention.
If you aren’t sure you need a property maintenance software solution, we have identified four common signs indicating it is time to change and invest in streamlining your maintenance process.
1: Your residents are unhappy
One of the most detrimental impacts of a poor maintenance process is its havoc on resident satisfaction. In fact, second to rent increases, maintenance is the number one reason residents leave a property. If you are starting to see more negative resident reviews or higher turnover rates, it may be time to take a closer look at your maintenance process.
At Property Meld, resident satisfaction is our highest priority. Our product was born from our co-founder’s negative resident experience with maintenance. Now, residents within Property Meld can easily submit a work order and pick times that work for their schedule for the repair to be completed. Then, residents and vendors can chat directly, removing the mediator. With customizable Workflows and chat templates, you can keep your residents in the loop at every maintenance process step. Customers using Property Meld have seen a considerable increase in maintenance-related 5-star reviews.
2: Your staff wastes hours scheduling work orders
One of the most time-consuming aspects of the maintenance process is getting repairs scheduled with vendors and technicians. Without maintenance software like Property Meld, this often involves a lot of back and forth and hours wasted playing phone tag. To achieve healthy repair speeds, you should assign work orders in minutes, schedule them in hours, and complete them in days. If scheduling a work order with the correct maintenance person takes days, you have an inefficient process and need to change.
Property Meld takes scheduling to the next level. Our software tracks your average speed to assign and schedule so you know exactly where the process is getting bottlenecked. Monitoring the duration between a resident submission and the completion of a repair allows you to determine where you are inefficient and make strategic changes to improve the efficiency of your team and your processes.
3: Your speed of repair is increasing
In this day in age, we all know that residents want their maintenance issues resolved as quickly as possible. And depending on if they are happy with your service or not, it will directly reflect in your online reviews Specifically, our data shows that if an HVAC repair takes longer than 3.5 days, property managers have a less than 1% chance of receiving a positive review. This means tracking your repair speed is crucial to maintaining resident satisfaction.
One thing we have noticed is that many property managers don’t track their speed or repair, or they are making assumptions about their rate. Property management companies often think they have a healthy repair speed, but when they start tracking it, they realize it is longer than anticipated. With Property Meld, you can track your average rate of repair and your repair speed for specific work categories. In addition, you can compare your repair speed to others to see how you stack up against others in the industry.
4: Property owners are upset with high maintenance costs
Property owners want to know that you are taking care of their properties while giving them the best possible return on their investment (ROI). Most property managers send out monthly owner statements detailing how much was spent on maintenance. If, month after month, your owners are upset by expensive maintenance costs reflected on their owner statements, it may be time to make a change.
The best way to approach a costly maintenance repair is to be upfront with your owner. This way, they aren’t caught off guard when receiving their statement. With Property Meld, owners can approve maintenance costs over a certain threshold through a dedicated owner portal. This saves time for property managers by removing having to constantly reach out to owners to support repair costs. In addition, with our customizable Owner Hub, you can give your owners just the right amount of transparency into the maintenance process.
If you are struggling with any of the issues mentioned above, it may be time to invest in a property maintenance software solution. Schedule a demo with our maintenance experts to see how Property Meld can improve your maintenance process and the overall success of your business.
