When managing multiple properties, maintenance and repair issues happen all the time. While you may think that dealing with these is a no-brainer, in reality, to consistently provide a high-quality service and achieve a degree of cost-effectiveness and responsiveness, prioritizing maintenance issues is essential.
Here’s how we prioritize maintenance issues to keep all residents safe and happy:
Emergency Maintenance Issues
Safety always comes first. If you keep this in mind, maintenance emergencies are generally easy to identify. These are the issues that immediately and effectively threaten the safety, general habitability, and long-term investment of the property. For instance, a short circuit can easily set a building on fire. A burst pipe suddenly flooding the place is an issue of habitability for residents and can easily cause thousands of dollars’ worth of damage if not immediately rectified. A HVAC failure can potentially be dangerous, especially if there’s a gas leak. These are all issues that need to be prioritized over other maintenance requests.
High-Priority Maintenance Issues
Next on the list are high-priority maintenance issues, which are problems that do not mean immediate danger for the safety of a resident or the property, but if ignored, could pose a high financial risk, or could negatively impact your residents’ ability to live safely in their unit. Examples include leaking roofs or pipes, a pest infestation, or broken in-unit appliances.
Medium-Priority Maintenance Issues
These are mostly preventative measures that ensure the property always stays in top shape. Examples include changing filters, landscape clean-ups, and time-sensitive maintenance like slip prevention in the fall and winter.
Fortunately, a lot of high-priority maintenance issues can be prevented by regularly doing medium-priority maintenance. As an example, regularly cleaning gutters, inspecting and repairing minor roof damage, and routinely checking washing machine hoses for wear can prevent potential water damage.
Low-Priority Maintenance Issues
Just like emergencies, low-priority maintenance issues are also relatively easy to spot. Instead of must-haves, these are nice-to-haves. The requests that fall into this category don’t pose a safety risk, don’t damage the property over time, and don’t prevent residents from utilizing the common areas as needed, but make the building generally nicer and more comfortable. These are usually minor maintenance tasks that need to be taken care of from time-to-time. Mostly cosmetic changes such as wall repairs and painting, non-critical repairs of appliances, furniture installation or replacement fall into this category.
At Hales, we nurture relationships with many reliable and trustworthy contractors to ensure that we never let our property owners down when it comes to maintenance issues and requests. If you have any maintenance requests, our web portal is open 24/7 and is monitored during regular business hours. We strive to deal with every request promptly and in a timely manner and no longer than one business day.
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