Categorizing Tenant Maintenance Requests

If you are managing some or all of your rental properties, then you will be getting calls from tenants regarding maintenance/emergency issues. One way to deal with these inevitable calls is to break them down into four major categories.

The first category is emergencies. For life threatening emergencies, like a fire or a gas leak, you will want to find out if everyone is okay and if 911 has been called. For non-life threatening emergencies, you need to determine if there are any immediate actions for the tenant to take. For instance, if there is flooding, they need to locate the main water turnoff to prevent further damage.

The second category is urgent. Has the AC or furnace stopped working completely? Are critical appliances like the stove or refrigerator broken? For some of these, you may be able to guide them through fixing the problem. For example, turning the hot water heater’s pilot light back on if their hot water doesn’t work. All of these things require prompt, but not necessarily immediate attention. Of course, if it’s the dead of winter and the heat goes out, this gets upgraded to an emergency.

The third category is non-urgent but necessary. This includes things like pest problems and minor appliance malfunctions. You don’t need to send a guy out at midnight to exterminate cockroaches or fix a broken garbage disposal, but it does need to get taken care of in a timely fashion.

The fourth category is non-urgent and unnecessary. These include everything from complaints about that really big tree that drops way too many leaves every fall to frivolous cosmetic requests.

As you can see, there is some overlap between these categories, but knowing roughly where a reported problem falls can help you determine what level of action it requires. Do you need to get on it ASAP, can you make calls tomorrow to get it scheduled, or can you ignore it (politely telling the tenant why) entirely?

Until my next post,

James

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