Property management companies

How work moves at a property management company

A property manager works for owners and serves the people who live or work in the buildings. Residents and tenants report problems through a portal, a phone line, an after-hours service, an email or a text to someone they know. The office triages: is it an emergency, is it in scope, who handles it. Maintenance technicians take the work they can, and outside vendors take the rest: plumbers, electricians, HVAC, roofers, cleaners and painters.

Work above a spending limit needs the owner's or the board's approval. When the work is done, the vendor invoices, someone matches the invoice to the work order, and the cost is charged to the right property and owner. Planned work runs alongside: inspections, preventive maintenance, seasonal services and capital projects.

Then there are turns. A resident moves out, the unit is inspected, a scope is written, vendors are scheduled in order, and the unit has to be ready by the next move-in. Every day it sits empty is rent not collected. At month end, owners and boards get financial reports and, often, a narrative of what happened at their property.

The roles are property managers and assistants, a maintenance supervisor and technicians, a vendor network, leasing staff, accounting and an owner relations or association manager.

Where it usually breaks

Requests are retyped from every channel

A resident texts the manager, who emails maintenance, who creates a work order. A vendor calls with an update that never reaches the record. That is the re-entry trap.

Vendors work from half the scope

The vendor gets an address and a one-line description, not the access notes, the approved amount or the photos the owner wants. The job is done and the paperwork is not. That is the handoff gap. See subcontractors don't know what was agreed.

Approvals wait on owners and boards

Work above the limit goes to the owner or the board by email and waits. The resident calls again. When approval arrives, nobody can say who approved which amount. That is approval drag. See nobody knows who approved what.

Residents and owners cannot see where things stand

The resident does not know when the technician is coming. The owner does not know why the unit is still vacant. Both call, and the office spends its day on status. That is the invisible queue. See customers call asking when the crew is coming and owner reports are built by hand.

The first workflow we usually look at

Usually the path from a maintenance request to a closed work order with its vendor invoice matched and charged to the right owner. It happens many times a day across the portfolio, it touches residents, the office, technicians, vendors and accounting, and its gaps show up as repeat calls, unbilled costs and unhappy owners. If turns or owner approvals cost the business more, the Spec says so and focuses there.

We sit with the people who take requests, ride with technicians, walk a turn, and follow a set of recent work orders from report to invoice.

The systems in the picture

A property management company usually runs some mix of these:

• Property management software for units, leases, work orders and owner accounting
• A resident portal and an after-hours answering service
• Vendors' own invoices and, for larger vendors, their portals
• An accounting system, sometimes inside the property management software
• Group texts and phones between the office, technicians and vendors
• Spreadsheets for turns, inspections, vendor insurance and capital projects

What a Workflow Spec looks like here

A Workflow Spec for a property management company is priced by deployment, and takes up to five business days on site. We sit with the office through a busy morning of requests, ride with technicians, walk turns, and interview the people who touch a work order from report to owner statement. You get the workflow map, the business case, an adoption design built for the people who would use the tool, and a fixed proposal for the build. The answer can be not to build. Details are on how we work.