Handling Property Management Maintenance During and After a Crisis

On this week’s episode of The Property Management Show, we have invited the co-founder and CEO of Property Meld to talk to us about the subject everyone’s talking about – COVID-19. Ray Hespen is specifically discussing what’s happening with property management maintenance right now and what we can expect and prepare for once this pandemic is contained and we are all moving on.

Property Management Maintenance During and After a Crisis:

Introducing Ray Hespen and Property Meld

Property Meld is focused on property management maintenance. The company provides a platform to automate a lot of steps that help property managers follow-up with maintenance work, verify what’s been done, and communicate with residents, owners, and vendors.

Ray and his team work with management companies to improve quality, create efficiency, and keep costs down.

Since the entire industry is in a weird situation right now, he’s the obvious expert to talk about what this means for maintaining rental properties. He’s also going to shed some light on what property managers can expect maintenance to look like after this crisis passes.

Rental Property Maintenance and COVID-19: The Big Picture

Property Meld has analyzed data to look for changes in behavior. They’ve found a few key things:

* Renters are concerned about submitting repair issues and having people come into their homes.

* Not all landlords and management companies want to send techs out to complete repair issues.

* There have been some big shifts in behavior. The drop-off has actually been about 25 percent fewer maintenance requests than the normal curve this time of year.

That’s pretty significant.

An Absence of Repair Requests Leads to Ghost Issues

This is the “COVID effect” on maintenance. When renters don’t submit the requests for repairs that are needed, ghost service issues are created. These are things that exist, but as a property manager, you don’t know about them.

People are at home more, so a higher number of repair requests would normally be expected. But, the 25 percent drop tells us that a lot of repairs are needed but not noted.

Some property management companies have told tenants that if the repair is not an emergency, they shouldn’t submit it. That’s one way to do it. But, as more information has come out, the better recommendation may be to encourage your tenants to submit the repair request, and then prioritize what really needs to be done. That will reduce the number of ghost service issues that are floating around out there.

If you don’t have tenants submitting their necessary repairs, you’re not going to be able to prepare for what you need to fix.

After the crisis subsides, there’s going to be a huge influx of maintenance work that needs to be done. It will likely be overwhelming for property managers and their maintenance teams. So, you need to have a sense of what kind of work you’ll be looking at.

Property management companies are generally taking the requests that they currently have and prioritizing those that absolutely need to be done. The completion rate is 56 percent lower than the normal completion rate. This tells you that only half the work is getting done.

With these two contributing elements and a backlog that’s growing every day, there’s going to be some deferred maintenance. The work that’s needed will pile up. Assuming that the social distancing requirements ease up a bit in May, there’s still going to be a large backlog that takes you right into summer, which is the busiest time of the year for most property managers and their maintenance teams.

Renters aren’t submitting but they will at some point. Their property issues are not going to fix themselves. When people are comfortable submitting maintenance requests again,