Managing Tenant Requests
If you are managing many properties you will inevitably have many tenants contacting you regarding maintenance issues at their property.
How are they contacting you currently?
By Phone?
The phone generally is the first port of call when tenants are looking to get in touch but there are some issues with receiving all your tenant requests this way.
- Your staff will always be multitasking, research shows that that switching from one task to the next takes a serious toll on productivity.
- Phone conversations tend to be open-ended in a bad way and rarely stay concisely on track.
- Unless you type up every phone call, what was spoken about on the call is rarely recorded.
By Whatsapp?
I have come across more and more agents that receive work order requests through WhatsApp. There are some pros and cons to communicating with tenants in this way.
Pros
- Can receive detailed images and videos of the issue.
- Easy for the tenant to submit.
- Can forward easily through WhatsApp to contractor.
Cons
- Lack of detail (e.g no name, address in message)
- Feel like you need to deal with request straightway.
- No record for your team to see history.
- Bad for work/home divide, Tenants have your personal number.
By Email?
This is a much more effective way of getting your tenants to log issues, here are some tips to improving this even further:
- Insist on a description and a picture
This will hopefully reduce the back and forth of emails and then you can simply forward this to the landlord or contractor.
- Ask them to insert the property address in the subject
This is will help you identify it straight away and deal with request without emailing tenant back.
- Get back to the tenant in a timely manner
They will then have faith in the email request process and won’t need to follow up with a call, they will then email requests again in the future.
Use a shared email address (e.g [email protected])
This will allow any of the team members to pick this request up, important to mark it as actioned too to reduce double jobbing.
By Online Form?
An even better way to capture maintenance requests is through online forms. This allows your tenants to fill in their info easily and for you to control the information requested, for example:
- Address of the Property
- Description of Issue
- Picture of Issue
- Contact – Name/email/mobile
You can set these up for free using Google forms or request a form to be created by your web designer.
If you are already an Acquaint client you already have a unique maintenance form that automatically integrates with your CRM, check out the help video here.
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Ciaran Behan on Tuesday, February 2, 2021 in Blog