Your Ultimate Guide to Property Maintenance Services
Property management and maintenance services may seem like two sides of the same coin.
Even though they’re both essential for preserving and enhancing your property’s income and value, they are different disciplines. Whether you manage residential, student housing, or commercial properties, property maintenance services refer to activities involved in the upkeep of your property. Thus, it’s sometimes considered just a subset of overall property management activities.
Of course, property management also includes all of the tasks included in property operations, such as collecting rent, property marketing, accounting, and handling leases. While managing properties requires more than maintaining them, no property owner or manager wants to simply leave such a critical aspect of building management to chance. Take a moment to learn more about various aspects of building maintenance management, why it’s so important, and of course, how to handle it better and more efficiently.
What is Property Maintenance and Why Should it Matter to You?
Property Maintenance Defined:
Property maintenance is the strategy and tasks involved in keeping your rental properties in good condition. There are routine property maintenance tasks, such as ensuring fire detectors are in working order, pool services (if applicable), ensuring lighting is functional, and so on. There are also larger, less frequent maintenance projects such as roofing, parking lot or walkway paving, etc.
Why Are Property Maintenance Services Critical?
The reason maintenance is so critical is to avoid the unexpected maintenance issues that can arise if the upkeep is ignored. You really can’t overstate the importance of property maintenance services. One report pinpointed the outbreak of SARS in Hong Kong to poor building maintenance. Other potential and more common hazards include injuries from falling building materials, fires, or poorly kept walkways. No property manager or owner wants to face claims of negligence in court, deal with skyrocketing insurance premiums, or experience bad press and negative reviews. To avoid serious problems, property managers have to consider maintenance one of the most important parts of their job.
Besides reducing the risk of property injuries for yourself, your employees, and your tenants, you need to have a good property building maintenance system in place for plenty of other reasons too. Consider just a few examples:
- Increased property value: A maintained property will hold value or increase in value. The lack of repairs will detract from the property’s market value and rental prices.
- Satisfied tenants: Poor maintenance of buildings, property, and appliances will generate dissatisfied tenants and may break the terms of your own lease.
- Reduced costs: An efficient property management program can help save money by minimizing risks, extending the life of appliances and equipment, satisfying tenants, and decreasing manual effort.
- Less work: Property managers have plenty of work to do. By having a building maintenance system in place, you can reduce the time you spend contacting tenants and owners, tracking work orders, manually entering data in other software, paying invoices, and dealing with emergencies.
It’s no secret that you need to keep your property maintained to maximize its value. In turn, this can give your company a chance to maximize rental prices and even be more selective about tenants. When you satisfy tenants, you should also enjoy lower turnover and lower the risk of charges that you have broken your end of the lease agreement through negligence.
Your prudent investment in a good building maintenance program will help improve your profits, preserve your good reputation, save time, and reduce hassles. You have every reason to invest in property maintenance services.