One of the biggest pain points for landlords and property managers is maintenance. If you’ve ever experienced an unexpected rental emergency you know the feeling: a late night phone call, a panicked tenant, and images of money flying out of your bank account.
Even small, routine maintenance tasks can become a strain on your time and finances if you’re trying to juggle tenant communication and contracted maintenance workers. That’s why we put together a list of free tools that will make it easier to manage all the maintenance tasks that come with owning a rental property.
Property inspection app
Doing a full inspection of your property is an important step when buying a rental property, but you should also be doing a complete inspection between each tenant. For this, we like to use Tap Inspect. It’s a free app with a professional inspection template that covers every inch of your property and allows you to upload photos for documentation.
Although it was created for professionals, it’s super easy to use for anyone to use. You can choose whether the property you’re inspecting is a single or multi-family home and it has markup tools for circling problem areas or leaving comments. Not only will it help you organize the things you need to do now, but it also ensures that all your regular maintenance is getting done- which means fewer surprises in the future.
Maintenance tracking tool
Rentler is a comprehensive tool for landlords that makes it easy to pay rent online, screen tenants, and accept applications, but they also have a free maintenance request tool for DIY landlords. You can receive requests online, time-stamp and save all requests, set a priority level, share the status with your tenants, and upload any related photos or documents.
Saving all your requests in one place can also help when it comes time for tenants to move out. You can reference past issues and make sure everything is addressed in your tenant’s move-out checklist.
Handyman booking app
Handy is a service that lets you hire out maintenance tasks to qualified professionals on a case-by-case basis. Once you download the free app (or create an account on their website), you can submit your maintenance issue and Handy will link you up with one of their experienced professionals.
Whether you want to deep clean your rental between tenants or renovate a kitchen, it typically ends up being much cheaper to hire them through Handy and you get to select when you need them to come by- which makes it perfect for those times you need to work around a tenant’s schedule.
Maintenance request templates
If you’re not ready to use digital maintenance tracking, you should at least have a work order template you can use to record maintenance requests and completed services. We recommend finding one with an itemized description of the problem, hours spent working on it, and the cost.
It’s also helpful to have a template for tenants to fill out when they have a maintenance request. Something like this will help you get all the details in one place and makes it easy to refer back to when it comes time to give back a deposit. You can print them out and keep a stack in your office (if you have one) or include them in a move-in info packet.
How do you track maintenance requests? Is there anything we missed? (P.S. If you’re looking for more free property management tools, we made a list right here!)
Originally published on Groundwork
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