Optimizing maintenance processes can significantly impact both time and cost savings as a Property Manager. In this blog, we’ll explore ten proven strategies tailored to streamline your maintenance operations. From establishing clear processes and effective communication to leveraging advanced software solutions, we’ve got you covered.
Whether you’re a seasoned professional or just starting out, implementing these techniques will undoubtedly elevate your property management game. Let’s dive in and revolutionize your maintenance efficiency:
1. Have a Clear Process in Place
Make sure you have a clear process in place that is consistently followed every single time by everyone. If you have property managers all following different processes, you’re going to end up with a chaotic, disorganized organization. Setting clear expectations and processes that all of your employees follow will create a harmonious environment that will immensely improve your maintenance efficiency.
2. Communicate Effectively
If you want to streamline your maintenance operations and improve maintenance efficiency, you must communicate effectively with everyone involved in your process. If you aren’t keeping your residents, vendors, and property owners in the loop, you can cause a lot of frustration. Find one source of truth that everyone in your organization is leveraging so that all your conversations can be kept in one place and you never lose track of a text or call.
Latchel offers communication tools that consolidate all of your maintenance communication in one place where you can easily manage texts, emails, phone calls, and even video calls.
3. Document Every Step
Make sure everyone involved in your maintenance process has full visibility into your work order statuses. If you’re using a property management platform for maintenance, make sure everyone is using it and updating each status so nothing falls through the cracks.
Having full visibility into your maintenance status from one place gives you the power to control the outcomes. Leveraging a maintenance tool like Latchel allows you to easily view maintenance tasks and job statuses on an all-encompassing board, so you can track maintenance with ease.
4. Automate the Tedious Tasks
Manually conducting every single tedious maintenance task can suck up so much unnecessary time. Improve your maintenance efficiency by automating these tedious tasks so you can direct your time to the parts of your business that drive growth and results.
Did you know that property managers who use Latchel don’t have to touch over 70% of their work orders? Leveraging a property maintenance tool like Latchel allows you to automate some of your most time-consuming tasks. Property Managers can set up key maintenance rules to manage basic tasks automatically. You can also set budget limits within Latchel so you are only notified when jobs need a budget approval.
5. Troubleshoot Before Dispatching
How many times have you sent a service provider out to a property for a “maintenance issue” that required them to do something as quick and simple as flipping a switch? When this happens, you end up spending unnecessary money and wasting valuable time on something the tenant could have easily resolved on their own with a little assistance.
Improve maintenance efficiency by troubleshooting maintenance requests before unnecessarily sending out a service provider. Leveraging a property management maintenance platform like Latchel can help immensely with this. In fact, Property Managers who use Latchel for maintenance support are able to resolve or de-escalate 31% of maintenance issues through troubleshooting.
Want to learn more about the best tips and tricks to troubleshoot maintenance issues with tenants? Download our Free eBook: Troubleshooting Your Maintenance Costs Away and explore ways to reduce maintenance issues on rentals, increase your operating income, and save money by reducing maintenance costs.
6. Leverage Reports and Analytics
Understanding your operations health is key to running a successful property management business and improving your maintenance efficiency. Leveraging maintenance insights and metrics allows you to trust in your process and verify that you’re getting the results you want. You can manage against outcomes instead of managing individual tasks.
How can you continuously improve and fill gaps in your maintenance process if you aren’t taking a step back and analyzing your progress? Using a maintenance platform like Latchel gives you full visibility into custom analytics that you can build yourself.
7. Streamline Your Accounting
Working with different vendors can get a little messy when you don’t have a set place to collect invoices. If you want an efficient maintenance process from start to finish, do not neglect this part of the process.
Leveraging a property management maintenance tool like Latchel can help you simplify your invoice collection process. Property Managers are able to view all their submitted invoices and payments made through Latchel from a single screen making it easy for their accounting teams to reconcile statements.
8. Build a Preventative Maintenance Plan
Building a preventative maintenance plan is absolutely crucial for enhancing your maintenance efficiency. If you can prevent a maintenance problem before it occurs, you’ll eliminate the risk of costly repairs, extend your asset lifespan, and enhance your tenant satisfaction.
Following a preventative maintenance plan can significantly improve your maintenance efficiency and reduce the risk of getting caught up in a whirlwind of urgent repairs.
If you are interested in mapping a plan and a solid operational flow for emergency maintenance issues but don’t know where to start, download this guide packed with actionable steps to master your emergency maintenance operations.
9. Invest in the Right Software
You can’t follow all of the steps above without investing in the right property management maintenance software. Using an excel spreadsheet will only get you so far. If you want to enhance your maintenance efficiency, it’s essential to utilize the right software that gives your team full visibility into your maintenance operations, streamlines your process, and automates those time-consuming tasks.
Having one source of truth that your team works out of is key for keeping your business on track. Committing to a new software can be intimidating at first, but it’s absolutely imperative to adapt and get a system in place that’s going to save you time in the long run. At Latchel, we offer a top-tier onboarding process that allows property management teams to get started quickly and seamlessly.
10. Integrate Your Software
It’s extremely important to invest in software that integrates with your property management systems. There’s no property management software that does everything you need it to do. Think about it… would you go to your primary care physician for brain surgery? I would hope you would go to a credible brain surgeon for that.
The same goes for your software. Invest in the right software that is specialized and integrates with the other platforms you are using. Latchel has an open API that synchronizes your data with the most popular property management systems like Yardi, Rent Manager, Propertyware, and more!
Improve Your Maintenance Efficiency With Latchel
Latchel is a maintenance software that shields your team from the 24/7 barrage of work orders while generating a new revenue stream at no cost to you. If you’re ready to start saving time and streamline your maintenance operations, request a live demo here.
