Property Meld CEO and Co-Founder Ray Hespen joined Rent Manager for this month’s Tech Tuesday, a valuable webinar for property management leaders to solve business challenges with technology, to discuss the importance of analyzing maintenance data. As a fully integrated solution with Rent Manager, Property Meld allows maintenance teams to use industry-leading maintenance software while syncing all pertinent information into Rent Manager. This integration removes the laborious task of double entry and helps property managers and maintenance coordinators work together with seamless data syncing.

In this episode of Tech Tuesday, Hespen shared the importance of maintenance analytics, the Ladder of Maintenance Excellence, leading vs. lagging indicators, and a sneak peek into Property Meld’s new Insights tool.

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Why Does Maintenance Matter?

Property maintenance is the most controllable yet least optimized property management expense. Many property management companies overlook the opportunity to lower maintenance costs and even utilize maintenance as a tool for revenue generation. Property maintenance is not only necessary but can significantly impact your ROI. In addition, maintenance has a significant effect on lease renewals and owner retention. Below are some data points illustrating this:

• 31% of residents say maintenance is the reason they left a property
• Property management companies have less than a 1% chance of receiving a positive resident review if a work order takes more than 5.5 days to complete
• Greater than 12% in maintenance costs versus rent roll is when investors will leave their property manage

Principles in The Ladder of Maintenance Excellence

If you haven’t discovered the Ladder of Maintenance Excellence, we highly recommend subscribing to the Maintenance Minute for an in-depth understanding of how to solve each step on the maintenance ladder. The ladder outlines the most critical aspects of the maintenance process. It highlights what issues need to be solved first and in what order to achieve maintenance excellence. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs inspires the ladder. Maslow’s theory states that our actions are motivated by particular physiological and psychological needs that progress from basic to complex. Our Ladder of Maintenance Excellence is similar, outlining the steps to achieve Maintenance Excellence, from effective communication to achieving a predictable NOI. This article breaks down the Maintenance Ladder step-by-step.

You Can’t Move What You Don’t Track 

Without visibility into your maintenance process, determining what changes to make is difficult. It’s like saying, “I want to stop spending so much money,” without looking at your bank account to determine where you’re spending the most. Property Meld likes to break this into two groups. Those who are utilizing data to catch issues by observing indicators and those that make changes by escalation after something goes wrong.

Many in the industry are currently catching process issues by escalation. Examples of this could be an angry email from a resident, a negative online review, or losing your property owners. If you only decide to make a change after these things happen, you are being reactive with your process, and it will be difficult to sustain or improve with this mentality.

The more innovative way to manage maintenance is to catch significant problems early. Suppose you start seeing longer than average repair speeds, or your technician utilization rate drops. In that case, this allows you to catch problems by indication and implement changes before something escalates into a bigger issue.

Leading Vs. Lagging Indicators

A leading indicator is a predictive measure that foreshadows an event or outcome, whereas a lagging indicator looks back at whether the intended result was achieved. For example, imagine you’re driving on the highway and the speed limit is 40 mph. You look at your speedometer to ensure you’re following the limit. Your speedometer is a leading indicator telling you how fast you are driving, which is a prediction into if you’ll be receiving a speeding ticket. So if your speedometer is a leading indicator, the speeding ticket is the lagging indicator.

In property maintenance, there are many leading and lagging indicators. Speed of repair is a leading indicator of your resident satisfaction. Maintenance spend per unit is a leading indicator of owner retention. However, in some cases, leading indicators may become lagging indicators. Take resident satisfaction, for example. Resident satisfaction is a lagging indicator of your repair speed but a leading indicator of your online reviews.

How Can You Measure These Indicators?

Property Meld’s new Insights dashboard is the first in-depth, real-time data tool visible for property management companies thus far.

Insights allows property managers to gain unparalleled insight into their maintenance process to begin catching by indicators.  With visibility like never before, property managers can start making decisions that are data-driven instead of guessing.

“Rent Manager is one of the pioneers of integrating the marketplace and the reason why we are one of their most popular integrations is because everything maintenance related is automatically updated in Rent Manager in real-time. So you get all the benefits of Property Meld, but you are able to see everything in Rent Manager.”

To see a customized demonstration of this industry-changing product, fill out the form below to speak with our team.