Maintenance Requests: Reduce Tenant Complaints and Decrease Liability

Handling maintenance requests properly is one of the reasons if a tenant will renew their lease or not. So if you want good long-term tenants that help take care of your property, you got to handle maintenance requests professionally.

Maintenance that the tenant will take care and what you will provide should be outlined in the lease. The proper way to handle these maintenance requests are:

1. Maintenance should be outlined in the lease contract.

2. Require ALL maintenance requests in writing

An email or a request in a property management software (herein Smart Housing, we have a space in our landlord dashboard for maintenance requests), should be required before you entertain a maintenance request, and remember to tell your tenants to be as detailed as possible when sending maintenance request. It will be better if he can include a detailed picture of the defect if applicable. And since you require EVERY maintenance request in writing, this should be included in the lease and every property manager should be strict in following this.

Why have maintenance requests in writing? The first and primary reason for this is documentation, date and time stamp and the content itself of the request is proof for their maintenance request, and this also records multiple requests for the same thing, which goes to show that you have a needy tenant or if issues have to be addressed on a different level. These written requests also give you permission to enter the property. This also reduces redundant, frivolous calls and requests.

If your tenant has a maintenance request, you may advise them to send that request in writing.

Responding to Maintenance

After receiving that maintenance request in writing, whether you got to take care of the issue or not, you need to respond to each request in writing.

After you receive their maintenance request, if you need to ask to follow up questions, this is the great time to do so, you want to get as many details as possible on the issue. This will save you or your vendor a lot of time in the repairs.

In your response, you want to tell the tenant (1) when the repairs will be done, (2) who will be doing it, (3) that tenant cannot request maintenance directly from the vendor. If there are additional repairs the vendor needs to attend to, they have to ask your approval first before they can do additional work. Tell the vendor to notify you if they notice anything unusual in your unit. Of course, this will need a follow-up inspection if there is something not usual in your unit.

Of course, keep a file of all maintenance requests you receive, whether physically or electronically. This is for documentation purpose so whenever the need arises, you can show them these documents.