One of the best ways to create happy residents is to fix maintenance issues quickly and effectively.
In the property management industry, the primary reason for negative reviews is maintenance issues. Even more striking, 31% of residents reported that maintenance issues were the primary reason they left a property. Second, rent price was the only larger determinant. You should note the correlation between maintenance repair speed and resident satisfaction. To help your team, we constructed data-driven repair speed recommendations. This will assist in higher resident satisfaction!
Repair Speed Recommendations
- HVAC repairs: 3.5 days or less
- Plumbing repairs: 4.5 days or less
- Electrical: 5 days or less
If a maintenance issue takes longer than 5.5 days to fix, you have less than a 1% chance of receiving a positive review. In the end, measuring the speed of a maintenance repair is important as it’s related to resident satisfaction. This is the ultimate measure of how your maintenance process is working. By tracking how long each repair takes compared to the result of the resident’s satisfaction, you will understand the repair duration affects the resident experience.
One caveat: you should never use the day you receive an invoice from your technician or vendor as the date of the job’s completion. Rather, your maintenance process should have built-in checkpoints.
Maintenance Process Checkpoints
- Request made for maintenance repair through a technician, your property management company
- Technician/vendor should notify property management company’s direct contact, or record its completion date using property management software
- Afterward, the resident creates an online review or provides feedback from experience
We’ve said it before but it’s worth repeating: in today’s digital world, online reviews are currency. In one study, 78% of prospective residents said a property management company’s online reviews were the number one factor in choosing where to live. This figure continues to rise by over 10% for millennials — a whopping 86%!
In the property management industry, the primary reason for a negative review is maintenance issues. So, if you want to preserve your company’s online reputation, you’d be smart to start with building a consistent, checkpoint-oriented maintenance process. Although it’s a lagging indicator, the satisfaction level of your residents is important. It’s worth keeping an eye on!
Of course, you can also craft your own system outside of online reviews to track resident satisfaction. If you choose this route, our advice is to avoid the pitfall of selective surveying. Selective surveying may help you intercept some issues, but will taint your data and the analysis pointless. You should attempt to survey every resident who has had an interaction with your maintenance operation. This will ensure there are no barriers to entry for the reporting of their experience.
When companies present their performance, revenue and profits attract the most attention. But those figures only tell one part of the story: the “end”. By using KPIs, you can gain deeper insight into the inner workings of your business, identify and prevent problem areas, and ensure a happy ending.
What do you think? Learn more about how you can track your speed of repair and streamline your maintenance process in a brief exploration call with one of our maintenance-obsessed representatives.
