Property Maintenance encompasses tasks such as responding to tenant maintenance requests, addressing safety concerns and conducting property inspections, in addition to more specialized duties such as cleaning and landscaping grounds.
Conducting routine property maintenance helps avoid equipment breakdown and emergency repairs, keeping residents happy while encouraging renewal of lease agreements.
Maintenance Checklists
Maintenance checklists are an invaluable asset to any property management team, helping eliminate miscommunication and serve as a roadmap for each maintenance technician, especially new hires. Checklists can also be quickly and easily updated, helping reduce errors and rework.
Maintenance checklists can help keep properties safe, well-kept and up to code. Some are targeted specifically towards plumbing or electrical systems while others can cover an entire facility – for instance an electrical preventative maintenance checklist should include items like checking smoke alarms, fire extinguishers and carbon monoxide detectors are working correctly as well as when professional inspection may be required by law in certain regions.
Other preventive maintenance checklists for buildings should include items like checking that the roof is in good condition, checking for leaks, cleaning gutters and maintaining them regularly. They should also cover long-term items like scheduling a licensed electrician to perform a comprehensive examination of electrical systems every three to five years.
Making and using maintenance checklists are an effective way to reduce repair costs and keep your property looking its best. By adopting them into your business practices, they allow you to break the cycle of ad-hoc maintenance and concentrate on growing and improving it instead.
Safety Inspections
Regular safety inspections can help minimize workplace accidents and injuries. Inspections should include people, work processes, equipment, materials and the environment. Utilizing a checklist during these checks will ensure all hazards are identified and corrected quickly – this can reduce future incidents as well as more severe property damages.
When conducting a safety inspection, it’s essential that employees and supervisors understand its purpose. By having multiple people conduct the inspection process simultaneously, multiple tasks may be covered without one person becoming overwhelmed or distracted from other duties causing errors or oversights to be missed, making the inspection more efficient overall. This approach can make the inspection more thorough than ever.
Property inspections provide more than just safety risks – they also can detect structural issues that threaten to compromise the integrity of your rental properties and could cost a great deal to repair, devaluing the properties. Yet with regular inspections you may catch these problems early enough that they don’t become costly repairs down the road, saving both you and your renter money in the process.
Routine property inspections can also ensure that your property complies with insurance policy requirements. Many policies contain specific stipulations about property maintenance standards; failing to meet them could result in denial of an insurance claim or cancellation of the policy – routine inspections help keep those policies intact and protect your investment.
Maintenance Contracts
Maintenance contracts are legal agreements between businesses and service providers that outline the terms and conditions of a relationship between these two parties, from general upkeep to more specialized repairs and more. Each contract should include details negotiated between both parties such as how long a contractor will work for, compensation structure details and any additional provisions regarding compensation that might exist between these two entities.
Contracts should also include details regarding whether or not work is preplanned, unplanned, and how any additional services will be billed for. Any unique criteria, such as pricing per device or special requirements for critical assets should also be detailed in this contract. It should also outline tracking processes as well as reporting requirements between both parties.
Contracts should also define how an agreement may be terminated, to help avoid any misunderstandings down the road. For instance, they should state that either party can cancel at any time if they are dissatisfied with their work and wish to terminate it early.
With the right tools, your team can streamline and optimize maintenance processes to achieve business goals. Home maintenance software like ManagerPlus can assist in scheduling customer appointments, tracking membership renewals, notifying customers who require upgrades or to renew service agreements and much more.
Reputable Vendors
Property managers should enlist licensed professional vendors as an extension of their in-house maintenance staff in order to address more challenging problems beyond their scope of expertise. This allows the property manager to focus on other aspects of business while still holding staff accountable for resolving problems, invoicing tenants or owners according to lease agreements, and any follow-up needed.
Maintaining a list of preferred vendors ensures your tenants can quickly get help for any maintenance issues, while providing consistent levels of service and reducing delays in finding suitable contractors for specific tasks.
Large property management firms frequently enter non-exclusive agreements with multiple vendors in order to guarantee they always have access to resources they need for managing their portfolio. This gives them leverage in negotiations for preferred pricing based on volume, relationships and quality rather than profit share.
Smaller property management companies with only one or two in-house maintenance staff members may lack the clout to secure preferential pricing from outside vendors, and may rely on individual maintenance technicians’ schedules and sick days for coverage. By using software that allows anyone to submit maintenance requests directly to your team and communicate via the ticket directly, small property managers may gain the flexibility needed to keep their properties running smoothly.
