Property maintenance is both the tenant’s and the landlord’s responsibility. Typically, tenants are responsible for the regular upkeep of their rental property, including changing light bulbs and keeping their yard trash-free. Landlords are usually responsible for more big-ticket maintenance, such as HVAC repairs, roof leaks, and electrical and structural issues. Keeping up with these tasks helps reduce the need for large issues requiring recurring rental property maintenance. Today, we’re reviewing six tips to help manage and reduce recurring rental maintenance.
Contents of This Article:
- What Is Recurring Rental Property Maintenance?
- 6 Tips for Managing Recurring Rental Maintenance
- Avoid Large Maintenance Issues With Professional Management
What Is Recurring Rental Property Maintenance?
Rental property management companies in Philadelphia know how important regular maintenance is. After all, when a property is well-maintained by the tenants and the landlord, it is more likely to attract interest in future renters. Additionally, it helps lessen the amount of recurring large-scale maintenance problems.
While periodic and scheduled maintenance is crucial to owning rental properties, recurring maintenance for the same issues can indicate a more significant problem. For instance, if you constantly have to service your HVAC system, you may be missing something larger than a blocked vent or a small leak. In this case, acting quickly is crucial to avoid costly repairs or replacements.
6 Tips for Managing Recurring Rental Maintenance
Recurring rental property maintenance can be costly and time-consuming. As such, it’s important to recognize large issues from the start and resolve them quickly.
Here are six tips to manage recurring rental property maintenance that will help to keep your properties well-maintained.
- Communicate With Your Tenants
- Practice Preventative Maintenance
- Everything Has an Expiration Date
- Standardization and Automation Keep Things Simple
- Keep a List of Repairs Made and Expenses Paid
- Stay Prepared No Matter What the Situation
Communicate With Your Tenants
Established lines of communication will only make things easier for you and your tenants. If tenants know their landlord cares about their maintenance issues, they are more likely to take care of their property, too. However, it’s a two-way street.
Keep tenants informed about how maintenance repairs are going and if unexpected roadblocks may cause the repair to take longer than you thought. Respond to tenants’ reports and concerns as quickly as possible. Even if you can’t immediately fix the problem, let them know you hear their concern and that you will promptly take care of the situation.
Practice Preventative Maintenance
Preventative maintenance is preparing for a maintenance issue before it occurs.
This can be done by creating a schedule of inspections and maintenance. Depending on your properties, this schedule can be designed by week, month, or season. For example, you may schedule pipe maintenance right before winter to ensure they are prepared to sustain colder temperatures and won’t freeze or burst.
Even with a preventative maintenance schedule, always try to expect the unexpected. Maintenance repairs that don’t fall into the predetermined inspection schedule can still happen. However, they’re less likely to occur if everything is routinely checked.
A maintenance schedule can save you time and money in the long run, and well-maintained property will only increase property value.
Everything Has an Expiration Date
During property inspections, remember that everything has an expiration date. This includes appliances, paint, and even built-in fixtures like rugs and wood flooring. So, be sure to consider the age and condition of what you are repairing, the expected lifespan, and how many times it has been fixed previously. Additionally, consider if there are any safety concerns or price disparities involved with repairing it rather than replacing it.
Knowing when to repair vs. replace appliances or fixtures helps with tenant relationships and retention. Additionally, it can help to spread out expenses over time and manage a more even month-to-month cash flow situation for you as the investor.
Try to make good notes of larger potential projects for each property in the medium to long-term future. Items like removing large trees that may be creating a hazard on the property, replacing decks and porches, or resurfacing driveways will likely need to be taken care of at some point. These projects can come with hefty expenses and inconveniences for the tenants.
Standardization and Automation Keep Things Simple
By using the same maintenance materials, like paint colors and brands of appliances and hardware, you can save time and money on trying to remember what each property needs. This will also allow you to provide the same smooth transition to a move-in-ready property every time you’re looking for a new tenant for each of your properties.
You can also automate some changes in your properties, like changing your air and/or water filters in the same month or doing all of your leaf removals and clean-ups in the same week.
You can also invest in appliances that have longer expected lives, are tamper-resistant, or automatically turn on or off. Examples of nice additions that tenants will likely appreciate are automatic exterior lights or hardwired fire alarms with rechargeable batteries.
Keep a List of Repairs Made and Expenses Paid
Be sure to keep a full list of repairs completed and the time it took to complete them. Holding on to receipts from every repair will help this process. This information can be used to adjust and optimize your maintenance schedule. If you find recurring maintenance was needed on a particular property or type of appliance, consider increasing the number of inspections accordingly or replacing as needed.
Also, keeping track of what you spend on inspections and repairs will enable you to create a maintenance budget, and organized files come in helpful at tax time or for annual reviews of property income performance.
Stay Prepared No Matter What the Situation
Prepare for any situation by noting a few things. Know where your property’s electrical panels, gas, and water shut-offs are located to direct whoever is conducting inspections and maintenance in case of emergency situations. Making sure your tenants know where the water cut-off valve is can save you thousands of dollars in the case of a frozen or broken pipe. A badly broken pipe takes virtually no time to flood an entire house.
Additionally, you’ll want to know what kind of work is required to be conducted by a licensed professional. This can differ from state to state. So, check with your local building authority to ensure you stay on the right side of their guidelines.
Avoid Large Maintenance Issues With Professional Management
Recurring rental property maintenance can be time-consuming and expensive. Ignoring maintenance items means you risk having larger, more costly, and time-consuming issues that may appear unexpectedly.
Need More Advice? contact us today!
Professional help and management can typically help in these situations. Companies like Bay Property Management Group have the experience and contacts to quickly and affordably fix or maintain exactly what needs to be fixed or maintained without spending more than is necessary. Contact BMG today to learn more about our comprehensive rental management services throughout Baltimore, Philadelphia, Northern Virginia, and Washington, DC.
