Lowering maintenance spend is crucial to increasing investor retention in 2024. If left without property strategy or attention, maintenance can drain your resources and profits. With unpredictable maintenance, many property management companies don’t know how to lower maintenance costs.
Property maintenance is the budget item that is least optimized but offers the most significant level of control, which means that it’s crucial to find a cost-effective, scalable property maintenance process that increases efficiency and improves your bottom line. To accomplish this, many property managers have chosen to implement property maintenance software.
“To do what Property Meld does for me, you would need one capable full-time employee. Calls, missed calls, searching for the information… It’s priceless.
I got Meld just as I was looking at hiring another maintenance coordinator. I never had to make that hire. In addition, resident review scores have gone up, and employee turnover has gone to 0 because the job is less stressful.” – Matthew Flewelling, Property Manager
What Are Examples of Maintenance Costs?
Property maintenance costs vary based on property type, age, location, and market conditions. Routine repairs, such as fixing faucets and addressing daily issues, are common. Major projects like plumbing or electrical repairs incur additional expenses. Labor costs, whether for an internal team or third-party vendors, also contribute to overall expenses. To read more about the costs associated with property maintenance, check out this article for a comprehensive list.
What Are The Costs Of Not Doing Maintenance?
When trying to reduce maintenance costs, reducing the amount of maintenance you’re doing may seem like a logical solution. We’re here to tell you that’s a bad idea. Neglecting to conduct regular maintenance at your properties will likely cost you more in the long run.
Since property maintenance involves the general well-being of your residents and properties, severe consequences can arise if it is not handled properly and quickly. Decreased property value, withheld rent payments, increased investor churn, negative online reviews, and even legal disputes are all potential issues if you neglect property maintenance.
It’s not about doing less maintenance, it’s about doing more at a lower cost. In 2023 alone, Property Meld facilitated $723,997,461 in completed repairs.
To learn more about the consequences of not prioritizing maintenance, check out this article.
How Can You Lower Maintenance Costs?
There are a few key ways property management companies can reduce property maintenance costs in 2024. First, by improving the efficiency and productivity of your maintenance team, you can increase your output with the same amount of resources.
“I’ve seen an incline in our technicians getting to more jobs once we implemented Property Meld, and the calendar was key in that. Allowing us to see how many hours they were taking at each job.’ – Richard Zayas, Maintenance Manager
Secondly, monitor your maintenance spend per unit so that you can track it against your competitors and monitor any changes in spend. On average property managers with 500 or more units are spending $1,680- $2,592 on annual maintenance for each unit they manage. If you aren’t tracking this, you are left to make assumptions about your maintenance process, leading to resources being focused in the wrong areas.
Another one of the best ways to reduce maintenance costs involve being proactive instead of reactive. If you can anticipate when maintenance issues will arise, you can schedule repairs when it works for you and avoid paying inflated repair costs during peak seasons. Property maintenance software is one of the best ways to get more proactive.
Some examples of cost reduction from utilizing maintenance software include:
- Increase in time efficiency and productivity (4,786,554 maintenance tasks automated last year)
- Enhance resident satisfaction and lease renewals (Leading property management companies have an average resident satisfaction score of 4.2 – 4.6 out of 5 stars)
- Improve planning and budgeting (Track your spend per unit, average invoice cost, and the costs of internal vs. external maintenance teams)
- Compliance and risk mitigation (See how Property Meld’s clean data saved our customer $1,000,000 in a potential lawsuit)
- Preventative maintenance scheduling and oversight (Compare what percentage of your scheduled work is preventative versus reactive)
- Increased oversight with metrics and analytics tracking (It’s impossible to make strategic process changes, without data to understand where bottlenecks occur)
While there is an initial investment in acquiring and implementing property maintenance software, the long-term benefits outweigh the costs. Automating and streamlining maintenance processes can lead to cost savings in terms of time, labor, and operational efficiency.
