Maintenance metrics or KPIs are measurements that can help you determine the success or shortcomings of your process. A significant number of property managers presently do not monitor maintenance metrics. Oftentimes, this is due to the absence of a structured system for tracking work order data or the reliance on a manual and labor-intensive process. Additionally, some property management companies fail to grasp the significance and impact of monitoring work order data on the overall success of their maintenance department.
By tracking your process performance will help you understand where issues may occur. This leads to a very reactive maintenance process. Instead of monitoring things and making changes when necessary, managers and maintenance coordinators must wait for something in their strategy to fall apart before realizing it’s time to change. Tracking metrics allows you to resolve issues before they become significant problems. Below we have outlined some of the reasons that tracking KPIs are crucial to success in property maintenance.
Performance Measurement: KPIs provide a quantifiable way to measure the performance of your maintenance team and process. By tracking these, like the speed of repair and technician utilization rate, you can determine your maintenance team’s efficiency, identify improvement areas, and make changes driven by data.
Goal Alignment: KPIs help maintenance teams set reachable, quantifiable goals. In addition, KPIs help you ensure that your maintenance efforts contribute to the overall business objectives. For example, if you are trying to improve the renting experience for your residents, tracking your resident satisfaction and speed of repair are crucial. If you have set goals that you cannot reach, utilizing metrics can help you identify where your process is getting jammed up.
Benchmarking and Best Practices: Similar to goal alignment, KPIs enable maintenance teams to compare their performance against industry benchmarks and best practices. Property management companies can identify their strengths and weaknesses and implement new processes that have helped others in the field by analyzing the metrics of others in your industry or your competitors.
Cost Control: As mentioned earlier, a significant benefit to KPIs is the ability to be proactive instead of reactive with your maintenance process. Not only does this help improve the efficiency of your maintenance team, but it also significantly reduces maintenance costs. Implementing preventative maintenance practices and analyzing work order data can help you predict when things may break down or need to be replaced. This can help you avoid costly repairs and schedule maintenance tasks when parts and labor costs aren’t so expensive. Property maintenance can be so costly due to its unpredictability, but with maintenance KPIs, it doesn’t have to be.
Communication and Accountability: KPIs facilitate effective communication and accountability within the maintenance team. Establishing clear performance metrics allows expectations to be set, and progress can be communicated to stakeholders. KPIs also foster a sense of ownership and responsibility among maintenance personnel, encouraging them to strive for better results.
Owner Transparency: As a property manager, one of the critical responsibilities of your job is providing information and insights to your property owners. Owners want to know that you care for their properties and make them money. Expensive maintenance costs are often the source of a negative relationship between property managers and their owners. Instead of telling them how great of a job you’re doing, maintenance metrics allow you to show them. Your owners will have increased oversight and transparency into the maintenance process, leading to better owner relationships and retention.
If you are interested in learning more about maintenance metrics and their essential role in the success of your property management business, schedule a demo with our team.
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