How to Manage Maintenance on Property Management Software

It’s an unfortunate fact of life that, as a landlord, you’re going to get maintenance requests. 

Maintenance can be one of the most difficult and inconvenient aspects of owning and managing property. With that said, you want to make sure you’re taking it seriously. The average landlord gets six maintenance requests per year, meaning you have six chances to impress or disappoint your tenants. 

If you don’t stay on top of maintenance requests and deal with them swiftly and effectively, you’ll wound the relationships you have with your tenants. Bad landlord-tenant relationships lead to lower-quality tenants and higher tenant turnaround. Furthermore, unaddressed maintenance issues can lead to increased damage to your property.

The name of the game should be making the maintenance process as easy as possible for you and your tenants. The answer? Property management software. A good platform will allow you and your tenants to easily and quickly address any maintenance problems that may need to be resolved. 

This article will go over how you can manage maintenance on property management software. 

Submitting Maintenance Tickets

Handling maintenance requests the old-fashioned way may look something like this: Your tenant tracks you down in person or calls you and lets you know about the maintenance issue. You may have to find time to stop by the unit to look at the problem. You also have to remember the maintenance request and eventually get in contact with the appropriate worker to fix the issue. With so many moving parts, it’s easy to fall behind on the request.

Property management software simplifies everything. Tenants can easily submit maintenance tickets through the platform as soon as they have a problem. On the maintenance ticket, a tenant can include a detailed description of the problem, accompanied by photos. 

What’s nice is that all the maintenance tickets you receive will be organized in one location where you can easily view and manage them.

Getting Notified

One of the most crucial aspects of maintenance management is speed. If a tenant runs into an issue, you don’t want to take forever to get it resolved.

For this reason, you should strongly consider property management software that offers a mobile app. Much of your work as a landlord these days is accomplished on the go. You can’t always be at your office or your desk with a computer handy. However, in this day and age, the vast majority of us have our mobile phones on us at all times, so property management software with a mobile app will allow you to handle maintenance issues as quickly as possible.

You want to make sure that you have notifications turned on so that if a tenant submits a maintenance ticket, you can get on it immediately. After a maintenance issue has been repaired, you can mark it as resolved on the platform, keeping you organized. You can even set up automated reminders that notify tenants when a maintenance ticket has been resolved.

Multi-User Management

After receiving a maintenance ticket, you need to get the problem solved. Unless you’re a knowledgeable plumber, electrician, locksmith, etc., you probably need to send a specialist in to make repairs. Good property management software can make it easy to forward a maintenance request to the necessary provider.

You’ll want to look for property management software with multi-user management. This allows you to add multiple users in defined roles. For example, you can add maintenance personnel to the platform and give them access only to what they need for their role. This allows you to manage a team of individuals in a single centralized location.

Conclusion

While maintenance isn’t fun, it’s inevitable. No matter what kind of landlord you are, you’re going to receive maintenance requests. Good landlords will handle them swiftly and efficiently, while not-so-good ones won’t. To make the process as easy as possible for everyone, you should use property management software to manage your maintenance requests.