Handling Maintenance Requests During Coronavirus

[Catrina Linhard]

Coronavirus has led to a lot of adjustments, one of them being residents wanting to delay work orders or vendors not wanting to take work orders due to social distancing. So I thought it might be helpful to share some thoughts on best dealing with this and also get some thoughts on dealing with it as well since things at home can still break, or weather can still cause issues despite much of the world temporarily shutting down. 

Some maintenance can be deferred to a later date, but if a maintenance request is an emergency and it needs to be fulfilled, social distancing best practices should be communicated to both the vendor and the resident. It's okay to not shake hands, don't feel weird about wearing a mask, and stay 6ft away. 

Effective troubleshooting over the phone can be hugely helpful to this to avoid having to dispatch over something that the tenant can be easily walked through. There are many maintenance troubleshooting guides available online to make sure your maintenance team can do as much as possible to resolve or temporarily resolve issues via verbal instruction. I can share the one we use if anyone would like it.