We get it. You are busy. Every day you come into work, it feels like you are trying to put out a dumpster fire. Your inbox is filled with unopened maintenance request emails. Your residents are upset because you aren’t following up on their requests, and you are trying to keep all the pieces together.
This, paired with the complexity of the vendor shortage and limited staff, can feel overwhelming. It’s easy to say that the odds are stacked against you.
At the end of the day, you are just so exhausted that you become numb to the ever-increasing workload. Instead of tackling the issue head-on, you continue to go about the day-to-day motions, hoping you will have more time to solve these issues.
Well, there’s good news and bad news.
The Bad News: Your inefficient maintenance process is costing you both time and money.
We’d all love to think that we can magically produce more hours in the day. The reality is that you won’t get more hours in the day. And simply put, time is money.
When you cross a lot of little tasks off your checklist, you may feel like you are highly productive and have made progress. Unfortunately, quantity does not always mean quality.
Let’s dig into how much repetitive and manual tasks are costing you.
Repetitive tasks are costing you and your company valuable time.
CIO Insight shared that workers spend about 520 hours a year on repetitive tasks. That’s a little over 3 consecutive months, or one quarter of the year spent on the phone or sending emails and texts.
If you had an extra quarter in the year, how would you spend it? Would you allocate the time to revenue-generating activities, such as owner retention, resident satisfaction, or growing your portfolio?
If your staff had an extra 520 hours, you could continue to train and develop them to take on more revenue-generating activities. Your staff is a valuable asset to your company, and by making their job more efficient, you are giving them more time to learn and grow your business.
Repetitive tasks are costing you and your company money.
In addition to losing time on repetitive tasks, the return on investment (ROI) spent on manual tasks is very low.
Let’s say that you are paying a worker $20/hour to manage repetitive and manual tasks like follow-up calls, scheduling maintenance requests, invoice processing, repair estimates, and more.
520 hours x $20 = $10,400 spent on manual and repetitive tasks!
The return on investment is minimal because these tasks do not actively generate revenue, such as bringing in new residents or owners and investors.
An inefficient maintenance process causes a poor maintenance experience, resulting in resident and owner churn.
Everyone is subject to human error. As a result, manual tasks are prone to fall through the cracks. If a missed email regarding a repair request isn’t addressed in an expeditious manner, you now have an angry resident.
You already know that the longer a repair takes to be completed, the higher the risk of an unsatisfied resident leaving a negative business review and moving out. That’s because a poor maintenance experience is the #1 reason for resident turnover.
In addition, our data shows that there is a direct correlation between increased resident turnover and increased owner churn. That’s because higher frequency of turnovers results in increased turnover costs, vacancy gaps, and emergency maintenance repairs increase owners’ costs.
Ultimately, it all stems back to a poor maintenance experience caused by inefficiency.
Let’s explore a hypothetical scenario of how much inefficient maintenance can cost you:
Elite ABC Property Management Company has 500 doors. They conduct their maintenance coordination manually, sifting through their inbox of unread emails to find maintenance requests. Then, they spend hours going back and forth on the phone with vendors and residents to coordinate repairs.
Their residents and owners are unsatisfied with their level of service and poor maintenance experience. Their repair speeds are slow and the residents have had it. Elite ABC Property Management Company has noticed a 30% increase in resident turnover and 5% increase in owner churn. Here is how much their manual inefficiencies are costing them annually:
(A) $2,500 per turn average
(B) $3,900 in profit from a single owner
So the bottom line is even if you tackle your to-do list in a day, but you still have a poor maintenance process, you are still at high risk of your owners and residents churning.
The Good News: You can do more with less through automation while making money and saving time.
There is hope for a brighter future where you and your staff are not spending endless days following up on emails, and phone calls.
Automating maintenance tasks has been shown to decrease inefficiencies by 80%.
Automation creates rule-based triggers so that when a maintenance request comes in, it can either be automatically assigned to a vendor or send an automated message with troubleshooting instructions. This way, you are sure to do the right thing, every time. You no longer have to worry about missed calls or emails. Automation handles it for you, so you can get some shut-eye.
Another perk of automation is that it requires minimal effort and time. Implementing automation may sound daunting, time-consuming, and overwhelming. However, data shows that our users can create and implement automated tasks into their process in less than 30 minutes, but it is saving them hundreds of hours in wasted time and money. The minimal time invested is well worth the effort for the future.
If not today, when?
If you don’t change your process now, it won’t matter if it’s tax season, turn season, HVAC repair season, or winter. Your headache over your lack of time will remain the same, and you will be in the same spot at the end of the year, stretched on time and making ends meet.
According to research firm IDC, businesses lose 20 – 30% of revenue a year due to inefficient processes. That could be thousands of dollars, or, like the Elite ABC Company’s scenario, $145,500 lost in revenue. Is your company prepared to take that significant financial hit? Probably not. There’s still time to change the course of your year and future.
Request a demo to see how our maintenance software solution can automate your process so that you can save time and money.
