Who here hates dealing with maintenance!

Question

How many of you deal with maintenance day in and day out... Or just deal with pain in the butt tenants hitting you up while you're at your 9-5 to point out that a bee got into their house and they don't know why.

How do you deal with it?

What solutions do you wish you had?

How do you deal with it?

What solutions do you wish you had?

Ethan Lieber · Answer

If you're looking to just offload maintenance, there are services to do that. Not only can you get a service to take calls, but they'll put an experienced tech on the line to troubleshoot with the tenant. If that doesn't work, they'll call out to schedule a contractor and follow up to make sure everything got done. You don't have to worry about transparency either because they send you email updates and give you an online portal to track everything.

Feel free to direct message if you want recommendations/suggestions.

Michael Noto · Answer

@Jorge Roman Maybe if you directed the tenants to contact you by a method other than by phone it would help you not get as anxious as when you see your phone ringing while busy at work.

For instance, if you tell tenants that your preferred method of contact is email or text and request they take pictures of whatever the issues are it will probably help put things in perspective quicker and come up with a solution. It is frustrating trying to hear tenants describe what the issue is when you can't picture what the problem is in your mind.

Matthew Paul · Answer

I honestly would prefer to have to do no maintenance what so ever . In a perfect world nothing would break .

Yesterdays call was for no heat . Its a boiler . The circulator pump wasnt working . It wasnt broken , the boiler was low on water , the fill valve was rusted and no water going in the boiler . While there I noticed a drip on the expansion bladder . So I replaced them both this morning .

Do I hate maintenance calls , yes . But I listen to the tenants and check them out . Todays repair cost me less than $100 in supplies . ( Did it myself  I worked with a HVAC guy to learn how to repair my own )

Matthew Paul · Answer

Its part of the job .  Sometimes its serious and sometimes its not .  You dont know till you take the call

Jill F. · Answer

@Jorge Roman I have a written paper that describes and defines routine maintenance, urgent maintenance, and emergency maintenance that I give each tenant on move in day. Emergency maintenance involves large amounts of water or fire. For fire they are instructed to call 9-1-1.

Urgent maintenance is: no heat in the winter. A clogged toilet where there is only one toilet. A steady dripping faucet, a running toilet, a pest problem. Any issue that makes it impossible to live reasonably normally or is likely to cost more the longer it continues. I commit to answering urgent online work requests or texts within 24 hours and to have a service provider SCHEDULED within 72 hours.  I have only had one tenant (and he had some kind of personality disorder) that could not fairly accurately "grade" most maintenance issues given my descriptions.

For all other routine maintenance issues, I put it on the list and I give the tenant 24 hours notice when handyman is available to come out and work it.

Ryan Murdock · Answer

Nothing says you have to answer every call. Let them go to voicemail or setup a Google Voice number that you give to tenants which will add another level of screening so you can better control what is urgent and what isn't.

You can also hire an answering service fairly inexpensively. I did that early on and let them take messages and e-mail them to me. I had a few select items I instructed the answering service to call me directly about - no heat, water leaks, etc. That way I could ignore all calls EXCEPT if I saw the answering service's number pop up on my caller ID - I knew that was a legit emergency and took the call. Everything else, I could deal with later.

Johann Jells · Answer

Huh. My city and state are pretty tenant friendly, but that wouldn't fly. If they show up in eviction Court without the full amount due, they're out, no matter what their complaints about pests and maintenance are.  The burden would be on them to prove that my rent raise is "unconscionable".

Louis W. · Answer

Forgot to mention, my property is at San Francisco, probably the most tenant-friendly city in US. Lease or not, it almost doesn't matter. My tenants try to prevent me from raising rent by refusing to sign a new lease. Their strategy is basically trying to block me from raising rent with a huge list of maintenances. Long story... The detail is in my other post.

Johann Jells · Answer

I don't get it. A problem tenant threatening not to renew without concessions sounds like a self solving problem!

Most of my tenants are pretty reasonable, which means I did a good job choosing them. I got greedy last spring and took tenants who agreed to rent a place still under reno for as soon as it was finished, which got me an extra month of rent. I knew they'd be high maintenance, but they complain more than my 11 other tenants combined! "The basement laundry and storage area is dusty". OMG....

Louis W. · Answer

That's why my PM is worth every penny. They know what is constitute a repair and not an upgrade. They do it at a reasonable price without using my time and energy.

I made a mistake recently trying to manage a property myself. The angry tenants bring out hundred of repair and complain in the email to threaten me from signing a new lease with them. They demand lower rent and 10 year lock rate. A professional PM would know exactly how to handle all those repair requests and take proper steps toward working out that new lease in a legal manner.

Who here hates dealing with maintenance!

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