Property Management + CMMS = Easy Livin’

Property management– be it multi-family, commercial, HOA, you name it—is a whole other world of facilities management. It’s a delicate ballet of many working parts coming together in unison, and if all goes well it can exist just on the brink of chaos. As some of our team at FacilityONE have spent many years in the property management world, we know the challenges that are faced every day between property managers, maintenance teams, and tenants. We only could have dreamed of having a powerful CMMS at our fingertips to simplify things. So, it is our duty to pass along these 3 quick secrets for using a CMMS to quell the chaos and make it easy livin’ for everyone.

Enhance Communication with Tenants

Anyone in property management knows the drill: a large chunk of your day is spent trying to keep up with answering emails, taking phone calls, or scheduling face-to-face meetings with tenants—with a high percentage being about maintenance issues.

Tenants are paying their hard earned money for a comfortable home and they rely on the property management team to quickly respond to work order requests and communicate when a maintenance technician will be on site to fix any issues.

A Strong CMMS provides not only a work order portal, but also a tool to have seamless two-way communication between maintenance tech and tenant– all in one place. This helps prevent a frustrating loop of missed phone calls and angsty emails wondering what the status of their work order request is.

Had to order a new microwave to replace in an apartment? Had to schedule an electrical vendor to fix that pesky light in Bob’s Hardware Saloon? The CMMS work portal can allow your tenant to know these details and stay up-to date as the work order progresses.

Spend Less Time Correcting By Preventing

Honestly, the to-do list never really shrinks in property management. But, boy it sure would be nice to easily cross one item off — mitigating equipment downtime or breakdowns!  Setting up preventive maintenance schedules can drastically shrink the amount of incoming corrective maintenance work orders. This means more time to spend on budget planning, quality space turnover, and overall tenant satisfaction.

The beauty of using a CMMS is the ability to schedule preventative maintenance tasks regularly. There is no room for forgetting, because the system will automatically generate these work orders, assign them to an employee, track them to a piece of equipment or even and equipment group, and provide you with a historical track record containing all of that data for later analysis.

Things like daily grounds walks, monthly safety inspections, quarterly HVAC procedures, and even lease renewal check-ins can all be scheduled to generate work orders using a CMMS.

Know where to go, on the-go.

It never fails. You’ve just drifted off to sleep and then your phone starts ringing off the hook. There’s a massive leak and there’s water dripping from the ceiling and it’s only getting worse. You’re all the way at home and the clock is ticking!

Now imagine that you could quickly look at an interactive floorplan on your smartphone or table and find the water valve shutoff to stop the flooding. And imagine you could quickly get a screenshot or PDF and send that information directly to the tenant. The tenant can stop the flooding while you can make arrangements to start cleaning up the mess.

You just saved hundreds if not thousands of dollars in property damage—both yours and the tenants—and you allowed the panic factor to drop significantly.

A CMMS with interactive floorplans and mobile device access can make this scenario unfold and be resolved within minutes or even seconds! Furthermore, being able to store photos, manuals, and make/manufacture/serial number etc. allows your maintenance technicians to be able to save time and prepare when they are going to work on a specific piece of equipment. And more often than not, preparation enhances safety!

Track Data. Analyze Data. Make Decisions.

Property managers wear many hats, and have a lot on the to-do list every day. It’s easy to push important tasks like data analysis to the side, between other needs like leasing, budgeting or vendor communication.

With a CMMS, property managers get access to detailed records of every work order requested and processed. Then they can use this data to understand important maintenance KPIs like average processing time, average time complete work orders, where employee hours are being spent, which assets have a higher unscheduled cost, etc.

Even keeping track of costs for chargebacks and monitoring which tenants are generating a higher level of maintenance requests can all help in better preparing your team and planning ahead. Having quick and easy access to this kind of data allows you to better understand where and how you need to make business decisions.

Contact sales@facilityone.com today to see how we can help your Property Management lifestyle be one that is smooth sailin’ and easy livin’!