All Forum Posts by: Ethan Lieber

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.

I'd love to answer any questions you have about best practices around maintenance and maintenance coordination, particularly around vendor, tenant, and owner communication or 24/7 emergency response practices.

I have experiencing processing thousands of maintenance requests each month across tens of thousand of units nationwide. I'd love to share my learnings with the BiggerPockets community.

What pain points do you currently have dealing with your rental property maintenance? Any questions you have about how you can improve?

NARPM is a great resource. I'd also suggest looking at the #DoorGrowClub on Facebook. It is free and full of really smart property management companies that are focused on growth.

If you want to talk about best practices on maintenance, feel free to direct message me.

@Jim Shonts Had to laugh at those typos. Yes, we plan on adding in a textable line so that tenants could call AND text maintenance request issues. If you'd be interested in enabling our beta for your account, I'd love to do that! Since you're already on our maintenance service - we'd never send those calls back to you, our team would handle the emergency coordination as normal. 

The way it would work is your tenants could call or text their current Latchel maintenance number. When we detect an emergency over the text line, your tenant would actually get a call from our troubleshooting team to do a deeper dive when needed.

We're hoping that this text capability makes it easier for tenants to send in issues and also makes it easier for Latchel to screen issues more quickly. Let me know if you'd like us to put you into our beta! 

(We're also looking to test this with property managers and landlords that want to do dispatching and troubleshooting themselves, but would at least like a text AI to screen the request before getting the call.)

Hi everyone! I'm hoping to get feedback from the BP community for an AI Chatbot that I've built that screens maintenance requests from tenants. 

The idea is that instead of waking you up at midnight or interrupting your day, your tenant texts this AI Chatbot. The AI takes your tenant through an emergency diagnostic. It is built to know which maintenance issues could cause property damage or could be habitability issues.

For Emergencies: The AI will call you immediately. It will call you multiple times and leave a voicemail if you don’t pick up. It also sends a text and email with the request information. (The AI has been built to overcorrect for emergencies. Better safe than sorry, right?)

For Normal Requests: The AI will only send you an email to let you know when regular maintenance requests come in. This way you're not interrupted.

How helpful does this sound to you? Private message me if you'd like to try it out. I'm looking for landlords that could provide real life feedback on the technology.

@Jay Hinrichs - I don't believe Cozy was ever profitable before CoStar bought them. I think CoStar bought them as a pure data play. I'm sure they had some revenues from their add-on services and the $2 faster payments - but not enough to cover their costs. They had something like $18M in venture funding though. (So I guess they didn't really need to be profitable. Ha! That is the crazy world of VC money.)

@Reggie Maggard - Feel free to private message me if you want to talk about taking tenant calls and working through maintenance issues.

@Matt K. - You too Matt. Would be great to connect on a call. Feel free to private message me and we'll set something up.

Happy Thanksgiving.

@Latoya Bynoe, Yep, we're up and running now. Feel free to private message me and I'll give you all the details you need.

If you're looking for a call center that is more focused on maintenance deep diving and troubleshooting then feel free to private message me. 

The biggest issue with them is that they cost about 4x their nearest competitor and they don't do troubleshooting of the maintenance issues with experts. It means you may end up with a late night dispatch of a contractor when your tenant should have tried turning water shut off valves first.