What Maintenance Satisfaction Says About Your Operation
At Property Meld, we believe that if you want your property management business to be successful, there’s perhaps nothing more vital than ensuring maintenance satisfaction is high with your tenants and they are happy with the condition and upkeep of the place they call home.
What has us so convinced? We have the numbers to back it up.
According to one study, 46% of residents say maintenance satisfaction factored in their decision to resign a lease or move elsewhere, with 31% of residents reporting that maintenance issues were the primary reason they left a property. The only larger determinant? Rent prices.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. In today’s digital age, online reviews of businesses are currency. In another study, 78% of prospective residents said the management company’s online reviews were the biggest factor in choosing where to live. For millennials, it was even higher, at 86%. And as our data and other independent studies have demonstrated, negative maintenance experiences are the top driver for negative online reviews.
The Importance of Maintenance Satisfaction
One study was able to attach a dollar sign to the star rating system in online reviews, concluding that each one-star increase in a company’s online rating translated to an increase in annual revenue of between five and nine percent.
You don’t need to be a mathematician to understand why this makes sense. Lower ratings, often due to poor maintenance operations, lead to less prospective renters and fewer investors. With fewer residents and investors, the obvious result is lower revenue.
So, how do you analyze your maintenance satisfaction to find the flaws that are tanking your bottom line? Try to answer these questions:
“When I dispatch work to a vendor or technician….”
- Do I know if they reached the resident?
- Do I know when the work is scheduled?
- Do I know when the work was completed? (Not just when I received an invoice)
- Is the resident happy with the repair?
We’ll be blunt. It’s simply unacceptable if you cannot answer each of these questions for every outstanding maintenance issue you have.
But even if you can, it may be at an incredible cost. For example, say you can answer yes to each of the above questions but doing so means you need someone on your staff who follows up with a technician via phone to ensure each of these steps is met and confirmed. Over time, that adds up to a huge expense for something that can quite easily be automated.
How do you automate this process? That’s where we come in.
Aside from compiling reams of useful data that help you analyze your company’s processes and performance, our Meld software is able to track:
- Service Issues
- Status Updates
- Communications
- Technician Time and Performance
- Vendor Submitted Invoices
- Files/Picture Uploads
- Inventory
- Accounting
- Units/Tenants/Owners
- Different Property Groups
At the end of the day, if we had to boil this message down to one word, it would be communication. Steady, consistent communication between property managers, residents, and technicians throughout the process of a repair ensures the proper steps are followed, everyone’s expectations are clear and everyone’s needs are met.
Conversely, if there is a breakdown in communication, people are left in the dark, residents have bad experiences, negative reviews are written, and your wallet takes a gut-shot.
So, what are you doing to ensure you can track each step of a repair and facilitate consistent, productive communication between all parties? If the answer isn’t the same with each job, you need to take another look at your maintenance operation. It’s probably costing you a lot of money.