We all know how important a good maintenance team is to the day-to-day operational success of a property.

However, in today’s “I need it now” economy, the old ways of manual, paper-driven maintenance processes no longer meet these high expectations. Residents expect event-driven communications/updates, managers can’t be everywhere at once, and senior leadership relies on live data to make decisions.

Implementing a real-time maintenance operations platform is not just a nice-to-have, it is actually a necessity. Here are 3 Reasons Why Real-Time Maintenance is “Mission Critical”:

1. Good Help is Hard to Find…and KEEP!

Every multifamily operator we speak to faces a common challenge in the current economy: finding and retaining high-performing maintenance supervisors and technicians.

There is such a high demand for maintenance technicians that many community and vocational colleges have started offering CAMT (Certified Apartment Maintenance Technician) programs. 85% of participants with no prior experience have jobs lined up before they even complete the program!

A real-time property operations platform for maintenance can help in this transient employment market in a number of ways:

• Pictures, videos & timestamps provide managers the visibility needed to ensure both quality control and documentation standards are being met for new and temporary technicians.
• Instant resident feedback digitally linked to specific service requests make easy to identify and correct customer service issues before they become bad habits.
• Easy access to unit repair history (with embedded pictures, videos & timestamps of those repairs) can save new technicians significant time in troubleshooting and discerning appropriate course-of-action for the repair.
• Having state-of-the-art technology for your maintenance technicians can help attract and retain team members; especially the younger generation of workers.

2. Resident Engagement

This seems to be the buzzword in multifamily these days. Engagement goes beyond door-hangers or posting signs – its multi-channel communication that builds a relationship between the resident and their management company. Audrey Ference at Outbrain sums it up really well in her recent blog post:

“…engagement is about encouraging your customers to interact and share in the experiences you create for them as a business and a brand. When executed well, a strong customer engagement strategy will foster brand growth and loyalty.”

With maintenance being one of the highest-frequency ways multifamily operators interact with residents, a real-time maintenance platform should be a critical part of your resident engagement strategy.

Real-time text/SMS notifications & surveys to residents regarding the status and gauging the success of your repairs is an easy way to encourage this interaction Aubrey speaks of.

Additionally, when a resident calls up and asks about the status of a repair, a real-time maintenance platform is essential for being able to quickly and simply check if their repair has been started or how far along it is.

Of course – the resident wants to hear their repair is finished. Even if its not, being able to provide real-time data-points to a resident on the following points can be significant:

• is their request being worked on?
• who is working on it?
• when were they in the apartment?
• what is the current status?
• how long until its complete?

This real-time info can be the difference between a resident feeling frustrated that nothing seems to be happening, or satisfied that that everything is under control!

3. Quickly Identifying Operational Issues

Real-time data from maintenance operations can be the difference between small operational issues dragging on for months and becoming big issues…or identifying them quickly and nipping a potential problem in the bud.

Weekly monitoring of real-time, online maintenance dashboards can identify:

• discrepancies in service request volume, (ie., why so many at specific unit or bld)?
• if a particular technician is consistently receiving poor resident feedback?
• are service requests are taking longer than they should (as a whole, or for a specific tech)?

Regional & global real-time dashboard views can also be extremely valuable to senior management on a number of levels:

• are specific regions or sites over, or under-performing compared other sites or regions?
• are portions of the portfolio understaffed from a maintenance perspective?
• how do residents feel about their maintenance experiences at site, region and org-wide levels?

This data can also be extremely useful in maintenance personnel conversations/decisions.

These are just a few reasons of many reasons why a real-time maintenance is mission critical to multifamily operators. If you’d like more information on ServusConnect and how our real-time maintenance platform can improve your multifamily maintenance operations, engage residents, and provide the data you need to make decisions, use the button below to schedule a demo and learn more!