If you’re struggling with maintenance coordination, the problem probably starts with a failure to plan
Any great property with a great maintenance history has a great plan. And that plan needs to include a preventative maintenance program for every piece of equipment, every amenity, and anything at that property that requires proactive or reactive maintenance.
Where Maintenance Coordination Starts
You can start by taking stock of all the equipment and amenities that you have on a given property. And you can make a plan for the whole year based on that.
Once you have a plan, though, you need to communicate that plan. And everyone at that property will have some responsibility. You need to communicate to them what the maintenance plan is, and make sure that the people understand and agree to the plan.
If you have a plan and if there’s not real buy-in, your plan is going to fail. And even when everyone agrees to execute the plan, you need to make sure that they know how to do that.
Is everybody trained in all the preventative maintenance or maintenance requirements that will be asked of them throughout the year? Because you need consistency. You want to ensure that the same processes are followed at all of your properties by every single service manager, regardless of on-site turnover.
Executing Consistently
Further, you’ll need to figure out who will execute the different parts of the plan. You need to be able to assign tasks from the preventative maintenance schedule or the reactive work order schedule to employees or vendors so that everybody knows what they’re supposed to be doing.
Also, you need to be able to track the status of those tasks and measure performance. You need accountability. If somebody’s been asked to do something, you need to be able to tell that they’ve been assigned to that task, and that that task has been completed.
Next, you need a way to capture all of the data associated with these tasks. If someone is maintaining a piece of equipment according to your process and filling out an inspection form, you need to capture that somewhere. And if there’s data in that form, you need a way to extract it and use it.
If your form is capturing the pH levels of a pool, for example, you need visibility to know if that pH is out of normal range and do something about it.
Finally, you need a platform to store the history of the reactive work orders and the proactive maintenance coordination at your property.
- When was it done?
- Who did it?
- What process did they follow?
- What forms did they complete?
Ideally, this data will appear in a dashboard that gives you real-time visibility into all of those things. And if anything was missed, the dashboard should bring it right to the top so that it gets your attention.
How Maintenance Coordination Inspired Leonardo247
These maintenance coordination issues were the genesis of Leonardo247. All of those components are difficult to manage. People might do one task or another in the old analog world, but to track it all, you need a platform. You need to be able to communicate the plan, make sure people are following that plan, track them as they do it, and then store all the data that’s collected as a result.
That’s the purpose of Leonardo247. If you have a maintenance program, first of all, you need a way to record what that maintenance program is. You need to establish what your best practices, policies, and procedures are. And you need a way to communicate those to everybody in the field.
From there, you need somebody to assign the individual tasks in that plan to the people in the field. And then you need a way to track that it’s being done.
Leaving the Maintenance Coordination Binders Behind
These systems have been really inefficient in the past. People that have been in the multifamily industry for a long time are familiar with the giant binders that go with a maintenance program. There are reams of pages and processes that people are supposed to fill out and sign off on.
Also, when those processes change, it’s very difficult to implement those changes across a large portfolio. And if you ever needed to look and see what had been done, or pull up a specific inspection, that was a real pain — if you could even find it to begin with.
The right tool for maintenance coordination in today’s world is an operations and maintenance system like Leonardo247.
This system isn’t just for work orders, although that’s part of it. It also handles the proactive part of maintenance, which are subtle aspects that are oftentimes overlooked.
It’s very easy to live in a reactive mode, where you get work orders from the property and you fix those work orders. But if you aren’t proactive about property maintenance, you’ll have additional breakdowns. You’ll gonna have capital expenditures that aren’t in your budget.
You need a tool that can push tasks out to the right person at the right time, with the right process and the right form to be successful.
Develop Your Own Best Practices
Leonardo247 is designed so that you can start by figuring out what your process is. Then you codify that and turn it into actionable tasks.
You can also track whether things are being done in real-time. You have visibility in case anything was missed so that you can get involved.
If you’re a third-party management company, proper maintenance coordination is just as important. If you perform poor maintenance at that property or a poor-looking property, you’ll have unhappy residents, which translates into lower occupancy and issues with reputation.
Residents will go online and talk about how bad the maintenance is. You’ll have higher turnover costs because residents won’t want to stay at your property. Your achievable rents will be lower because you’re not can’t charge top-of-market prices when your property doesn’t look as good as the property next door.
All of these are reasons to make sure that your preventative maintenance program is thorough and implemented consistently. You need that accountability so that you have happy residents, owners, and clients. That’s the best way to grow your business — happy clients and happy residents who turn into referrals.