In previous articles, we’ve touched on the importance of rental inspections and their ability to act as a doorway to more effective maintenance management.

Today, we’re diving into a little more detail on why maintenance management, itself, is such a powerful value-add, and why getting this service right can be both easy for you and game-changing for your investors.

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Why maintenance management deserves to be in your service portfolio

At a lot of rental management agencies, maintenance management is considered a headache best left to investors to handle themselves. There are a few big problems with this.

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For starters, the base assumption is flat-out wrong. Maintenance management shouldn’t be a huge, frustrating time-sink. If it is, you’re either approaching it from the wrong angle, or not using the best tools for the job. More on that in a bit.

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The next problem with avoiding maintenance management is that it erodes the strength of your relationship with your investor. By forcing them to engage directly with their tenant on maintenance issues, you essentially dilute the investor’s reliance on you as a sole contact point. That means more risk of being cut out of the loop – and the lease – if things go wrong.

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The biggest problem with avoiding maintenance management isn’t the things that can go wrong, however. It’s the opportunities you miss by closing off this service avenue.

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By taking lead on maintenance management, you’re not only able to make your investors’ lives easier. You’re also able to strategically enhance their assets’ desirability and value through proactive upkeep and planned improvements – all while minimising long-term maintenance and repair costs. That’s value even the most demanding investor will not be able to ignore.

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What about the workload?

It’s all very well talking about value-adds, but what about the additional workload? Maintenance management doesn’t handle itself.

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The thing is, most rental asset managers are already doing a lot of the work maintenance management requires – they’re just not leveraging the product of that work to its fullest.

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For example, during inspections (ingoing, interim, ad-hoc and outgoing), rental managers literally create a detailed condition report of their investor’s asset. Certainly enough to advise/consult on items requiring urgent attention, or showing the first signs of wear and tear that suggest maintenance in the near future.

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But here’s the rub: figuring out what work needs to be done takes time and attention to detail, but, on its own, adds very little value to investors’ experience. From their perspective, knowing the kitchen cupboards are broken doesn’t help them get those cupboards fixed.

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But what if you, their rental asset manager, could turn the photos and description of those broken cupboards (taken during the inspection) into a job card to request quotes for repairs? What if that job card could be sent to a customised list of trusted contractors at the click of a button, and their quotes collated for easy comparison and approval? What if your investor could give their approval with the click of a button on the same portal they viewed the quotes on?

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That would be an experience that adds tangible value.

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But don’t stop there. What if you had developed a savings plan for your investor, keeping funds aside for emergency repairs and planned upgrades that could be actioned during a tenancy?

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How impressive would it be to actively improve your investor’s asset value and tenant satisfaction, while simultaneously reducing the impact of maintenance costs and the need for vacant periods between leases?

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It sounds unrealistic, but the truth is: you already do the work required to make this a reality. The question is whether you’re going to leverage that work to exceed your investors’ expectations, or leave them shouldering the mental and administrative load of maintenance management on their own.

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Where’s the catch?

With a value proposition this clear, you’d think every rental asset manager worth the title would include maintenance management in their service offering. In reality, very few are tapping into this potential.

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The only reason that we’ve been able to find is that the tools these rental asset managers are using simply aren’t designed to make maintenance management as easy as it should be.

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As you likely know by now, we’re big fans of all-in-one solutions. We spent enough time juggling multiple tools to perform basic workflows back in our own rental management days to know the unbearable inefficiencies of that approach.

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As such, it’s an ongoing wonder that WeconnectU remains the only end-to-end rental asset management ecosystem in South Africa. We’re also the only ones that offer RedRabbit – the world’s only solution combining inspections and maintenance management in a single, seamless workflow – as a fully integrated element of our rental management solution.

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All of the other solutions on the market focus either on maintenance or on inspections. To be fair, some of them do integrate with each other to cover a wider range of rental management workflows. But it’s never a perfect fit with a unified vision that solves all the pain points of managing a rental department.

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In contrast, our Rental Asset Management Solution has been deliberately designed to share data seamlessly between workstreams, including RedRabbit, in real time. This enables us to create massive efficiencies for WeconnectU users, leveraging workflows that span all rental management departments and functions, with no delays, no incompatibilities and absolutely no blind spots.

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As a result, our users are able to unlock every ounce of value from the effort they put in, effortlessly creating extraordinary customer experiences that put their services in a completely different league to the competition.