What property managers need that a plant CMMS does not do

Property maintenance looks like industrial maintenance and is a different job. The work is mostly reactive, mostly done by contractors, mostly inside somebody’s home or business, and mostly recharged to somebody. Five requirements follow from that.

1. Residents and tenants report directly, without accounts

The people who find the faults do not work for you and never will. If reporting needs an account, most faults reach you late through a phone call to somebody who writes it on a note.

2. Access is a first-class problem

A large share of property maintenance appointments fail because nobody was home or the unit could not be entered. Software that treats access as a note in a text field will produce a schedule that fails a third of the time. Permission to enter, notification, preferred times and access instructions belong on the job.

3. Contractors work by link, not by portal

Most of the work is done by small firms who will not create an account in your system. A job sent as a link that opens on their phone, with the address, the access notes and a place to put photographs, is the only version that gets used.

4. Costs have to land against the right party

Owner, tenant, service charge, insurance, or the contractor’s own warranty. If work cannot be coded to who pays at the point it is closed, somebody reconstructs it monthly from invoices, and that reconstruction is where disputes come from.

5. Evidence for deposits and disputes

Photographs at move-in, at move-out and at every visit, timestamped and attached to the unit. This is not maintenance data, and it is the thing that most often has to be produced under pressure.

What matters less than the vendor will suggest

Deep preventive scheduling, meter-based intervals and reliability analysis are all genuinely important in a plant and marginal in most residential property, where the plant is a boiler and some communal lighting. Do not pay for a reliability suite to run a portfolio of flats.