In property management, having access to maintenance metrics is necessary for maintenance teams to understand the health of their processes. Ultimately, without visibility, it’s hard to know something is wrong until it’s too late. Tracking maintenance metrics allows you to optimize your processes as needed.
However, if you aren’t tracking any metrics, an overflow of data may be overwhelming. Additionally, you need to understand what each metric means and its impact on your business. In this article, we have outlined the five most important metrics related to property maintenance. While there are many others Property Meld recommends, this is a great starting point for property management companies looking to increase their maintenance oversight.
1. Speed of Repair: Speed of repair measures the duration of a work order from when a resident submits all the way to completion. Speed of repair impacts many aspects of your business. Successful property managers address maintenance requests quickly and demonstrate their commitment to resident satisfaction, fostering positive resident relationships, and reducing resident turnover. Additionally, delayed repairs can lead to further damage to the property. Unaddressed maintenance issues can worsen over time, leading to more extensive, costly repairs.
2. Resident Satisfaction: Although resident satisfaction is not directly a maintenance metric, resident satisfaction is a critical measure of the overall success of your property maintenance efforts. Gathering input from residents regarding their maintenance experiences grants your team an invaluable understanding of how residents perceive the service you deliver. Plus, maintenance directly impacts resident retention, so keeping your resident satisfaction high is crucial to retaining your residents and achieving a low turnover rate.
3. Technician Utilization Rate: Technician Utilization Rate in property maintenance refers to measuring how effectively your internal maintenance technicians utilize their time. It quantifies the percentage of time that technicians spend on actual maintenance activities compared to the total available working hours. This metric provides insights into the efficiency and productivity of the maintenance workforce and helps identify opportunities for improvement and resource optimization. If you see a low utilization rate, it may indicate inefficiency, a low workload, or wasted time.
4. Work Order Completion Rate: This metric measures the percentage of work orders that are completed within a specified time frame. This is a great metric to track if you are trying to improve your speed of repair. Set a goal for your maintenance team for how quickly you want repairs completed, and then track how many work orders meet that goal. A high completion rate indicates that you have effective workflow management, a streamlined process, and an efficient maintenance team. If you are struggling to meet the goal you have set, that may be an indication that you need to work on additional staff training or identify where bottlenecks are happening in your process.
5. Response Time: Response time measures how long it takes for maintenance personnel to respond to a request after it has been submitted. A shorter response time indicates you have effective communication. In addition, the quicker you can respond to a work order, the happier a resident will be because they feel like their problem is being addressed promptly. With dedicated maintenance software like Property Meld, you can customize a response that is automatically sent to a resident after submitting a work order. This way, they are still receiving top-notch customer service without your team having a manual touchpoint.
