Exciting Improvements Means More Savings for You
written by David Lowrey, Owner SFPM
Things We Have Recently Done as a Tampa Property Manager to Improve!! (April 2018)
Outside Vendor Website Complete!
We just completed the outside vendor website for our Tampa property management company. I’ll be testing it this month and rolling it out sometime in May of 2018, for all our outside vendors.
Hopefully, this should decrease the time it takes to complete turns and getting your vacant home ready for marketing and a new tenant. By allowing outside vendors to access their work orders from a website (instead of sending them emails), they can complete real time and their bill will be processed within a couple of days. This gives these vendors an incentive to use the system and tells us the moment the work is complete, so we can immediately move to the next assignment in finishing the turn of the property.
Currently, we must chase down our vendors to see if the work gets done. Other times, they misplace an email altogether. Sometimes this adds a day or two to the time to takes to complete the entire “Turn.” Bottom line, your turn gets done faster and rented sooner
Flagging Repeat Air Conditioning and Plumbing Repairs
We’ve been testing (with great results) flagging Plumbing work orders in our software to the same house, if more than one work order is reported in a 60-day period. What we discovered before making this upgrade, was that repeat work plumbing work orders in less than 60 days usually means a severe blockage caused by roots.
For example, we might be called out to unclog a drain. The plumber uses a snake machine that appears to free up the blockage, and the toilet drains fine. However, the snake only cleared out the blockage, but the roots that have grown through the sewage pipe are still there. So, within a few weeks or months toilet paper gets clogged up again on these same roots. Tenant calls again complaining about the same blockage.
When we get that second work order now, we use a camera system to verify, if there are roots or something unusual that must be fixed. This extra step solves the long- term problem most of the time, thereby saving you real dollars in unnecessary expense.
We just turned this idea and are applying it to Air Conditioning units. My programmer has developed a script to flag an AC work order if an AC repair had previously been reported there in the last 9 months. What we found is that sometimes a quick repair will get you one or two years, or longer additional life out of an old AC unit. However, sometimes the small repair only lasts a few months, and we should discuss with the you, the owner, either replacing the unit, or doing a more expensive repair, like replacing the coil.
The challenge in the past for both plumbing and AC work orders is that it is extremely difficult to remember that we have been to the house in the last 1 to 9 months for the same problem. With this new software upgrade, our system will notify us automatically. The net result should be lower repair bills for you as the owner and happier tenants.
