Why Aren’t the Repairs we Requested Done Yet?
Show tenants the effort being expended on their behalf while they wait.
If you’re a tenant in a property managed by Royal Rose Properties, the chances are pretty good that over the course of your tenancy, something will need to be fixed. From your perspective, this is a pretty simple process: you log into your online portal and tell us what’s wrong, and we take care of the rest. But there are a lot of reasons that your maintenance request is rarely handled that easily and we’d like to explain to you WHY😊
The Maintenance Process in Brief
When you submit a request for work to be done, we get that request, and we have to go through a fairly significant process before the work actually gets started. Here’s the simplest version:
- You submit a maintenance request, which becomes a Work Order in our system.
- We figure out which Service Tech on our list is the best one to address the issue(s) you’ve told us about and assign the Work Order to them.
- We email the Work Order to the assigned Service Tech with your contact info and you are also sent an email with their contact info, so you can both reach out to the other to connect.
- Depending on your schedule, the Service Tech’s availability, and the urgency of the repair issue, it may take a week or two for an appointment to be set.
- If we sent the right Service Tech for the job, and the repair cost is under the threshold amount the property owner gave us to handle without their prior approval, the repair is made.
- If the repair cost will exceed the threshold we’ve been given by the property owner, the Service Tech will have to create an estimate for the owner to approve.
- We get the estimate, record it in our system, then ask the owner of your home to approve the cost of the repairs.
- Our Accounting Department checks the owner’s account to confirm we have the funds necessary to perform the repairs. If we don’t we have to wait for the owner to send the funds.
- Once we have owner approval AND funds, we send an approval email to the Service Tech to contact you to set an appointment to make the repairs.
- At which point the work finally gets done.
Maintenance Process Inherent Delays
In this ideal version of the Maintenance Process, there are plenty of possible delays that can lead to tenants becoming very frustrated with why it’s taking so long:
- You don’t take the time to accurately describe your repair issue, resulting in the wrong ServiceTech being initially sent, requiring us to reassign the correct ServiceTech to contact you for another appointment.
- You expect a weekend or after hours appointment (everyone does), which means a longer wait – IF we can even find someone to meet your requested time (we’ve had non-emergency requests for 11pm appointments!).
- Your request goes into a queue — our Service Techs aren’t sitting around doing crossword puzzles waiting for a call. We keep them very busy with assignments, requiring us to constantly juggle their Work Order priorities.
- An owner may take a week or even two before approving an estimate and sending the required funds. There’s not much we can do about that except ask them every few days.
- An owner may actually deny your request – either partially or fully.
- Owners often tell us to use your rent payments to fund repairs. This can be an issue if you choose to withhold your rent until repairs are made.
As you can see, there are several delays that can occur that are out of our control. As we’re not perfect there are also miscommunications and workload delays we are responsible for.
Maintenance Process Complication Delays
But the real slowdowns come when the process itself gets complicated:
- If the assigned Service Tech gets caught up on another job that takes longer than anticipated, there’ll be delays in addressing your request.
- If the owner has questions about the Service Tech’s estimate or wants them to do the job in a specific way, or only approves part of the work but not all of it, we have to communicate all that to the Service Tech and wait for the requested information.
- There’s some work that can only be done in certain weather conditions, so it’s entirely possible that the Service Tech could get to your house to repair a leaking ceiling and be unable to do anything about it because it rains while they’re on the way there.
- If it’s a big job, like a new driveway, new roof or sewerline digup, the owner often requests 3 estimates and that can take a lot of time during the summer when contractors are very busy.
If you’ve got a maintenance request and it seems like it’s been an unreasonably long time since you’ve heard anything from us, you can usually learn what’s going on by logging into your Tenant Portal and looking up the Work Order you created – we make a good effort to put notes about what’s going on, and if we don’t, you can always leave a question for us inside of the Work Order page, and we’ll answer it as soon as we see it.
Ultimately, we hope you understand all these challenges and appreciate that we really do the best we can for you.