Expectations of your Property Manager to Address Maintenance

[Brian M.]

What are your expectations of your property manager from a maintenance perspective?

We are currently trying a PM out for the first time and we've given them a triplex to manage. As a landlord, I tend to react very quickly to maintenance requests if they are urgent. If I get an urgent request at 10 PM (i.e. heat is out in winter, water pipe breaks, etc.), then I'm there within an hour to address the problem.

In the past 5 months, there have been 2 instances where a tenant called the PM with an emergency maintenance request. In the first instance, the basement unit tenant's apartment flooded due to a severe rain storm. The PM notified me the day after the call-in and took another day to go to the property and start cleaning up. They likely would have waited another day, but I told them that they needed to get there the second day.

In the second instance, a tenant called at 7:00 PM on Friday with an emergency request that the heat went out on a cold evening. The PM did not respond that evening, so around 10:00 PM, the tenant contacted me directly and asked for assistance. I followed up with the PM and the Maintenance Manager at 10:00 on their cell phones and I did not hear anything back from them until the following day.

Are these response times typical of your experience with PMs? If not, what timeline matches your expectations?

The PM contracts with a general contractor who, in addition to doing their own work, acts as the maintenance manager for the PM. Is this type of arrangement, where management of all general maintenance is farmed out to a contractor a typical arrangement that you have seen?

Thanks for your time,

Brian

[John Warren]

@Brian M. this sounds fishy to me. If you have a true emergency like loss of heat then you definitely should be responding pretty quickly even after hours. For routine maintenance issues I can understand not responding for sure. I believe with a PM that the mantra hire slowly/fire quickly makes a lot of sense. Your goal here is to outsource the late night calls, not manage someone else on how to respond.