What Are Property Maintenance Benchmarks?
Property maintenance benchmarks measure the efficiency of property maintenance processes. These benchmarks serve as vital reference points, aiding property managers, owners, or maintenance coordinators in gauging the effectiveness of their operations. By tracking these benchmarks, a maintenance standard is established while simultaneously identifying areas for improvement.
Benchmarking is the process of harnessing data to establish a baseline level of performance. Determining industry standards for maintenance helps you compare how your organization is performing against others in the business. The difficulty of tracking maintenance benchmarks is gathering accurate, up-to-date maintenance data. Property management companies still relying on paper-based systems find it increasingly difficult to access objective, real-time property maintenance metrics.
How Can Maintenance Benchmarks Help Your Business?
Property maintenance benchmarks are essential to a successful property management company. Maintenance is one of the most unpredictable aspects of property management. Still, property management companies that can get more predictive with maintenance can retain owners and residents and lower maintenance costs.
The only way to improve the maintenance process is to identify where your strategy is inefficient. Without metrics illuminating those inefficiencies, property managers are left making assumptions about their approach that often don’t yield the right results. Property maintenance benchmarks show how others in your industry are performing. This data helps ensure your maintenance practices meet industry standards.
10 Reasons Why You Should Track Maintenance Benchmarks
Property maintenance benchmarks can offer several significant benefits to your property management company, helping you streamline operations, enhance efficiency, and improve overall performance.
Here’s how property maintenance benchmarks can be advantageous for your business:
1: Efficiency Improvement: Benchmarks highlight shortcomings and bottlenecks in your maintenance processes. This insight enables you to make targeted improvements, streamline workflows, and optimize resource allocation, ultimately leading to cost savings and enhanced productivity.
2: Goal Setting: Property maintenance benchmarks can serve as targets or goals for your business to strive towards. They provide a tangible, measurable framework for setting performance objectives and tracking progress.
3: Decision Making: Data-driven benchmarks offer valuable insights for making informed decisions. Whether allocating resources, prioritizing maintenance tasks, or implementing process changes, standards provide a solid foundation for strategic decision-making.
4: Quality Assurance: By adhering to property maintenance benchmarks, you ensure consistent and high-quality maintenance standards across your properties. This will improve resident satisfaction, reduce resident turnover, and enhance reputation.
5: Resident Satisfaction: Well-maintained properties contribute to higher resident satisfaction. Meeting or exceeding benchmarked standards will lead to happier residents who are more likely to renew leases and recommend your properties to others.
6: Resource Allocation: Benchmarks aid in optimizing the allocation of resources such as labor, materials, and budget. You can allocate resources where they are most needed and adjust your strategies based on benchmark performance.
7: Competitive Advantage: Implementing effective property maintenance practices based on benchmarks can give your business a competitive edge. Consistently well-maintained properties are more attractive to residents and potential buyers, setting your business apart in the market.
8: Long-Term Planning: Property maintenance benchmarks can guide long-term planning and capital expenditure decisions. By identifying areas that require substantial improvements, you can allocate resources strategically for major renovations or upgrades.
9: Accountability and Transparency: Benchmarks create a sense of responsibility within your maintenance teams and vendors. Clear standards help everyone understand expectations and contribute to a culture of transparency.
10: Continuous Improvement: Regular benchmarking fosters a culture of continuous improvement within your organization. As you track progress and adjust, you can raise the bar over time and consistently enhance your property maintenance practices.
In essence, property maintenance benchmarks provide a roadmap for achieving operational excellence, optimizing resources, and delivering superior property management services, all of which contribute to your business’s overall success and growth.
What Will Happen If You Don’t Track Benchmarks?
In an increasingly data-driven industry, paying attention to property maintenance benchmarks is crucial to stand out against competitors. Failing to track and pay attention to property maintenance benchmarks can cause adverse effects across your organization.
1: Resident Dissatisfaction and Increased Turnover
Second only to rent increases, maintenance issues are the top reason a resident leaves a property. If you aren’t tracking how your maintenance team performs against others in your industry, you may lose residents to other property management companies with a more efficient workflow. In addition, a negative maintenance experience directly correlates to poor online reviews. If your residents are unhappy and leave negative thoughts about your business, you will find it challenging to retain and attract new residents.
2: Owner Churn
Property Owners and investors hire a property manager because they want someone to take care of their properties while keeping costs to a minimum. If you spend too much on maintenance or have an inefficient maintenance team, your owners will grow dissatisfied with your work. Keeping track of maintenance benchmarks can help determine if you are in line with your competitors. Sharing this information with property owners is a great way to build trust and show transparency.
3: Losing Out to Your Competitors
There are over 296,000 property management companies in the US, so providing an experience that outrivals your competitors is crucial. This is especially true when it comes to maintenance. A streamlined, efficient maintenance process is the best way to retain residents and owners and showcase how your company stands out in your area. Tracking maintenance benchmarks allows you to see how others in your area are doing and ensure your team meets industry standards.
If you are interested in learning more about how Property Meld can help you track and compare your maintenance process to industry standards, schedule a demo with our team of maintenance advisors.
In the meantime, fill out the form to download our World Class Maintenance Benchmarks, containing key maintenance data points allowing you to see how the rest of the industry is performing.
