Centralized Maintenance... Pros, cons, tips, etc...

Centralized Maintenance... Pros, cons, tips, etc...

I am trying to centralize the trades work and minimize site teams to facilities and low hanging fruit

Scott Chism are your teams working at multiple properties? And do they start in one specific location, get their "assignments", and head out for the day? Thx!

I'd say remote, but I'm not sure what pods style means

Scott Chism also, do you sub out turns or do in-house? Thx!

Tammy Fredenburg the turn team is separate they are dispatched based on availability

Scott Chism thanks!

Scott Chism would you mins sharing your unit/staff count, as well as number of staff on your turn team? Thanks so much!

Tammy Fredenburg sent you a dm

I like the idea of having one guy for multiple properties, take care of all the permits, safety, inspections, capital projects, preventative plans, inventory, budget, orders, SDS, contractors and bids. This frees up maint to get all the other “low hanging fruit”, and really concentrate on those.

John Yanik I like this! Thx!

Tammy Fredenburg If works out really well if you have multiple properties, because you may get a better price if let’s say you can get a contractor to power wash 3 garages. Or whatever recurring project ya got.

What does "centralized" mean?

Marcy Wicker for me it would mean combining resources from multiple smaller properties, located relatively close to the other, playing to strengths, operating more efficiently. Ideally, there'd be a few highly skilled techs that could perform tasks at multiple properties that would otherwise be contracted out at properties staffed by those without such skills, etc.

Sure sounds like a great idea. Why not centralize property managers and assist managers and lease agents. Beware, AI is coming to a location new you.

Bob Miller yes! For small companies that otherwise only have a staff of one, it can work great!

I’m following too!

Lisa Cote I connected with you on LinkedIn love to chat

Following as I have the same question. Looking to have remote or centralized maintenance to cover multiple properties and rely more heavily on vendors

Margot Brown I can help! HappyCo offers remote maintenance techs with decades of experience! Love to chat! [email protected]

When you say this, are you talking remote maintenance techs or pods style or something else?

The other piece of this is that we are moving our corporate office and there will be space to have a maintence "headquarters" so to speak. Wondering if that stop in the a.m. will cause us to lose time...

Hi Scott! Love to share more about what we are doing at Happy Force, We are a service by HappyCo where our trained maintenance service techs who have up to 25 years experience in Multifamily are servicing residents and the low hanging fruit for your onsite team. We are optimizing your team and bring value to your residents in so many ways. Our techs have been onsite before so they know all the in's and outs and can handling helping residents remotely. Believe it or not residents are very open and want this as they live by their phone and don't want to be bothered either when someone has to come into their home. Love to grab 30 minutes of your time. Please email [email protected]. I will also be at NAA if you will be there.

We have central office and maintenance team. Total of 6 manufactured housing communities. The furthest is 3 hour drive from main office. It can be challenging, but not terrible. On big turnovers, maintenance usually camps in an empty unit. They get in a lot more hours, and its safer than driving back and forth. We stopped paying hourly to drive to those locations, and pay mileage instead. It's cheaper for us in the long run. It can be difficult if there is an emergency, but we have local trades and residents we can call if there is an emergency to put eyes on a problem, or turn off a water leak.

We have found that centralization is helpful when you have multiple properties in a geographic region and mission critical when you are operating scattered SFR or small multifamily properties (I'm the CEO of FacilGo, a maintenance, renovation and turn software platform). Some of our recommendations include:

1. Have different maintenance technicians who start/end their day in separate locations across the geographic region. This will make scheduling and routing more efficient whether you use manual scheduling or automation.
2. Start out centralization with a team of technicians who have specialized skills and expand from there.
3. Use the right tools (software) to support whatever centralization approach you decide upon. Your solution should support both centralization of in-house staff, centralized management of outsourced services, and have the ability to choose and manage a strong set of service providers with whom you work.

Let us know if you have other questions about approaches for centralization. We have been proponents of this approach for a long time.