How do you schedule your maintenance?

[Andrew Herrig]

Anybody have any advice on the easiest way to schedule regular maintenance on your rental units without trying to coordinate schedules of 20 different people?

I currently have 4 rental units (1 duplex and 2 SFRs) all in different parts of town. I scheduled our A/C guy to do an annual checkup on all of them and also followed up with the tenants to make sure they would be available to meet him. Well things never go as planned and there were multiple reschedules, and all the back and forth communication that goes with it. I need a better way to handle this.

Here are my ideas, let me know if one of these works for you, or if you do something else entirely:

1. Put lockboxes on all my rentals so it doesn't matter if the tenant is there or not. I would still need to communicate with the tenant before anyone came, but seems easier.

2. Give the maintenance person the tenant's contact info to coordinate a time.

3. ???