Why is it so difficult to find Maintenance Techs?

Why is it so difficult to find Maintenance Techs?

Worth double their weight in gold when you find a good one!

Because unlike leasing, it's hard to take a fresh person with no experience and train them.

Supply and demand. Than the associated culture of maint techs. In past 40 years. Ive had numerous techs. The best ones stayed for years with good pay and left due to retirement or moving. The rest were let go.
Ratio of good to lousy was 3 to 10. Lousy ones took shortcuts. Performed lousy quality work. Brought personal and alcohol problems at work. Had lousy habits. Smart ones with good work habits and quality are worth highly and get paid very very very well with bonuses and paid vacations. Management is not totally dumb. We keep stats. On work. call backs costs etc. plus tenant input. We can tell very fast a valuable tech.

The problem is finding good ones! I have a awesome maintenance lead

Because as an industry, we’ve spent our time focusing on leasing and not servicing. Who’s more important? The flight attendant or the airplane mechanic. The flight attendant because that’s who the customer sees, right?
Not to discredit the leading team, but I’d urge people to at least spilt their efforts on grooming techs as they do leasing.
The leasing assistant spends an hour or two with the customer. The maintenance tech deals with the residents when things are not right and broken, permitted in to their homes and solves for the paying customer’s need.

There are so many bad managers out there who truly do not care! It’s sad how this industry has changed! I have an amazing team that follows me from property to property because of the way we all treat each other!!!

Maybe we need to pay them more and treat them with respect. In general I mean. Not necessarily referring to you!

As a tech, we don’t get paid what we are worth. It is true that you will run in to techs that are not responsible and have great work ethics. The ones that are awesome and worth keeping for a long period, do not get pay enough. This trade is fading slowly. Is it fair that a new hire with no experience makes 4 less and the lead tech?

No kidding it's Industry wide.

Realistically, you can start a an apprentice in a trade making more than what many of us pay our techs, and build to a career making much more in the process. Unfortunately a lot of the time (no offense to the truly great techs we've been blessed with), we are ending up scraping the bottom of the barrel a lot of the time and we're left with a lot of people that don't want to work or can't hold a consistent job or meet the requirements for a trade role. We really just aren't paying them enough!

A lot of them, including me, have went back to the construction business, less drama in my opinion. And the pay is better when you own the company.

There is a factor that’s in the multi family as a whole. This industry seems to paid less across the board in almost every aspect.
Leasing
Managers
Vendors
Maintenance
So the multi family is competing with other trades that pay more for the same (position)
Maintenance are going to the vendor side as techs making more with less “headaches”
Leasing are finding other sales position with more potential of growth and more income!
Managers are switching to the vendor side or changing careers (real estate, vendor side or commercial property management)
Vendors are providing their services to other trades where they earn more. This is due to the minimum amount a property is given to run the assets.
We as vendors that service more than 300 properties see a trend. We are being hired for a lot of turns due to the slack of man power.
We get contacted by the property staff for jobs quite often for different positions.
A painter at our company makes between $4k to $6k per month depending the amount of work they can do.
I believe there is something that needs to be fixed so this can be better.

Have known many to leave for a trade which pays more and no on call

I also believe requiring maintenance to be on call is why our industry is not attracting younger talent. Work/life balance is a priority for talented technicians. This is something our company has been changing for the weekends and some properties the entire week. We still have emergency service through vendor partners if it is a true emergency. But how many times do on call maintenance get woken up in the middle of a night for a noise complaint or something else that is not an emergency? At a minimum our industry should change to a live person call service who screens out these calls and doesn’t put the onsite team in the middle of telling a resident this is not an emergency that we come out for.

First of all, as an industry, we don’t pay our teams enough PERIOD. In addition, there much fewer qualified maintenance techs who will except $13 an hour when they can earn double that working for a contractor like HVAC. Simply, we need to pay our folks more for what they do and this, in turn, will make more people want to work in the field.

It’s kind of a catch-22 for the property management industry. Any kind of niche technician skill (hvac, electrician, machinist) typically requires a certification and/or insurance. Neither of those things are difficult to get, especially in the digital age where all you have to do is go to a website and take a test. Real estate developers and owners refuse to pay the insurance, and see it as menial tasks, which is why they still call in the certified/insured vendors when it’s more than an air filter or a clogged pipe. Which is where a lot of service techs end up going after they get the experience in property management. It’s a skills ladder.

Incentivize them with SMART goal based bonuses. Ticket times, score cards, secret shops, etc. And most of all....treat everyone on your team with the same respect that’s your treat your CEO.

I can possibly share some light on this subject..
If you were to call an electrician to come out to your home and replace a ceiling fan it’s gonna be probably a minimum of maybe $100.00
If you call a plumber to come to your house and remove a toilet and replace a wax seal it’s gonna be a minimum of $100.00
If you call a HVAC tech to come to your house to service your A/C well minimum of $100.00
A maintenance tech will do this on any typical Monday before he even goes to lunch! Are they being compensated or appreciated for this service?

They can work for a trade getting paid more, no shoveling of snow(where applicable), no on calls and overall usually deal with less "headache" doing what they love to do. Maintenance teams want to be heard, they want to know they're really apart of the TEAM.

Bc they are underpaid and overworked....Not all Managers understand the value they bring and how our ship would sink without them.

Owners need to build in and plan to spend more money for paying the management company, or the company needs to re-budget and pay staff more in order to compete with the jobs in the trades market.

This is not a néw trend. NAA published statistics a few years ago that said we would have 150,000 jobs not be filled, for the next ten years. Why? As my friend Jim Dean Jr. states, many experienced techs left the industry due to pay, call, lack of training, and poor working conditions. As an industry, we haven’t done a good job of letting people know that Multifamily is a great industry. As an industry, we’re working on that and in my opinion there are some good initiatives happening to raise awareness.

Because they’re generally overworked, under-appreciated, and underpaid as an industry trend. So there isn’t a lot of incoming talent to this field and those of us that have been here a while that find a good gig stay put.

We use to put up with it and so did maint. for one good reason free rent. When they took that huge incentive away a lot of us left and tell anyone looking in that field the truth about the industry. Not so bad to get woke up in the middle of the night when you live on site and it usually only took and hour. Those where the good ole days. Now its 20% discount on something they are not qualified to live in on that salary. Getting paid the same these days as we were in the 1980 and 90's except we got free rent then. So let me get this straight they have raised rents 300% since then and you still don't get paid more. So sorry.

Culture factors for sure as well, I worked for a company where we always felt that we are a moment away from being “fired” and it was a stressful environment. It pushed my to move out of the maintenance field and into a manger role

Finding people who are genuinely good at repairing things but also good with people just isn’t easy. I was a maintenance manager and regional director for years and always struggled to have good people.

It’s easy to find them but to find a good one is difficult

Give them the renewal bonuses not leasing agents, prioritze after hours calls to true emergencies and reward them for their hard work. Most of my guys have started from the ground up. Porter to Regional Maint Director, invest in them.

I pay the renewals out and split it with the whole team because it takes all of them. I also pay for training and with each certification they get a raise. They also get incentives for doing jobs that could be out sourced to vendors. Yes I totally agree that Maintanence helps with bottom line, keeps the residents happy and maintains the asset for the owner. If you can find a good one, keep them. Give praise when warranted on a regular. I am a Regional and I cannot tell you how many times I hear that I am not the typical Regional that I actually speak to everyone even grounds with the same respect as the manager. Respect goes a long way!

try temp agencies geared toward property maintenance and management. You can try them out and see how they do and they should be bonded by the agency

A little inside of what a Maintenance Tech has to encounter =
1. Hostile Tenants
2. Unsafe working conditions like dirty apartment, etc.
3. Poor Supply chain for parts and help
4. Poor Ticket Management Platform
5. Not being empowered to make a decission
6. Inability to access a unit safely or with proof of supervision for alleged theft
7. Ability to schedule after hour calls due to tenants ability
8. Being recognized by management to be more than Handy Manny
9 and 10 I leave open for now.
In a nutshell, for an apartment your need a very skilled person and they won't work for minimum wage or cheap.
Consider that that guy is like Physical Plant Manager in a smaller platform.
Promote and train from within, it is well worth if done right.
Open for discussions.

So, let’s change the narrative. What are the benefits of the apartment service tech field? What do we want people considering the field to know? I’ll start... 1. Excellent opportunities for advancement. 2. Very stable employment. And go...

Offer a free apt works every time in VA. Plus if they quit on you not only will they need a job they will need a place to live

Because they all are self-entitled and finding any Techs that have an inkling of what it's like to actually work is a needle in a haystack

Self entitled may be your answer which I can not argue, however after seeing the trend of how Maintenance Techs have been treated over the past 30 yrs of my career in the Multi Family industry, I would say people who are on call 24 hours a day, keep up curb appeal, make the units smell good, look good and feel good are just tiered of being looked down on. You are Looking for a Carpenter, Plumber, A/C tech, Electrician, Drywaller, Painter, carpet tech, Lock smith and much more for the price of a Hamburger flipper at Mc Donald's. So I ask you you "Why is it so difficult?

As a corp employee married to a former Maint supervisor, they are EXTREMELY underpaid for the amount of work they do. And to then deal with management and corporate's unrealistic and unreasonable expectations it tends to turn good maintenance into people who would rather do ANYTHING else but.

We are an industry that lives and dies on market data analysis . We do not do that consistently with salary information. I don’t think we have responded to one of the lowest (pre pandemic) unemployment numbers in many years. When you see a billboard in your area offering apprentice welders, with no experience, to train, at $39 per hour, a light should go on somewhere.

Shortage of skilled labor to meet the demand. It’s a terrible problem for our industry. Treat the ones you have well. Train them. Work with them. Encourage them.

Completely agree with this!

Yes, the perennial question!

Because no body wants to work anymore.

I am a workforce development consultant. I would like to find out the requirements that most apartment maintenance technicians need to meet for entry-level employment? I am partnering with a non-profit in the D.C. area and they are looking for a niche area for training to develop a pipeline for D.C. residents who don't have college degrees but need to make a decent living. There are so many apartment complexes in the city and surrounding areas, so it seems like a good field to tap into. I would greatly appreciate any advice!