Residential Property Maintenance Metrics and Improving NOI (with Ray Hespen)

Ray Hespen, who is a frequent flier on The Property Management Show, joined us again to discuss maintenance metrics and how measurement improves resident satisfaction and owner NOI. The last time he was on the podcast, in late 2023, his team was just beginning to establish this concept of maintenance analytics. He was investigating what it would look like if property managers looked at maintenance from a data-driven standpoint. He was beginning to collect all the necessary data. It’s been more than a year now, and we brought him back to talk about what he’s seen since then. The Evolution of Data-Driven Maintenance If you get good measurements, you never lose. Property management has been in this black hole of information and according to Ray, that’s because we relied so much on having exceptional people run our business. It’s a super-high trust game. But, you can’t move what you can’t measure. So in order to scale, Ray and his team at Property Meld released a product that’s the best industry representation of the real world. Insights and Insights Pro are basically ways to understand your own property management business against a ladder of maintenance excellence. It’s a deep diving into: Vendor efficiencyTechnician efficiencyCoordinator efficiencyBenchmarkingFinances You know what the performance actually is instead of trusting someone’s gut. Ray says it’s been surprising to see how the market has wrestled with some of this. There are some components of the data that people don’t like. They’d rather not look. Then, there are some customers where the metrics are so good, but they still want to get better. Essentially, providing access to all of this data and insights has opened Pandora’s Box. There’s no going back. It’s possible to measure leading and lagging indicators. And now, it’s possible to consider how to move those numbers. Knowing they exist is one thing. Using them to improve performance is what comes next. Geographical Insights in Maintenance Performance The most interesting data gathered from maintenance requests and responses is geographical. Ray says what’s most important in the information that’s been gathered is that property managers can see their performance against geographical regions and areas. It’s clear to see that property management companies in the southern states, which have warmer summers, have a high speed of repairs and increasing maintenance costs in May. So, it would be unfair to compare yourself to a property management company in Minnesota that does not have air conditioning repair costs until July or August. The geographical impact to maintenance in weather regions is important. Property managers don’t want to think they’re killing it or falling behind when the data is geographical. That’s what Ray calls a “big a-ha.” Customer Satisfaction and Its Impact on Retention Customer satisfaction has become a much-discussed part of property management, and that covers the satisfaction of residents and owners. It’s important to remember that resident satisfaction also affects owner satisfaction. Technically, property managers have multiple customers, but there’s also a hierarchy. Would you rather lose 50 percent of your owners or 50 percent of your tenants? Exactly. So, the hierarchy starts at the investor. Property managers do not have a business if they don’t have an investor customer. But, if property managers can make the resident happy, it’s much easier to hang onto those investor clients. So, one of the indicators of investor satisfaction is resident retention. One of the reasons that tenants leave is that they hate the maintenance. In the macro environment today, no one wants a rental on the market. Avoiding that as much as possible is important. Also, maintenance costs are growing 8 percent year over year. No one wants to turn a property when maintenance costs are higher and rents are holding or even compressing. When you’re driving investor retention, a property manager needs to look at resident retention and annual maintenance spend per unit. That’s what matters: resident experience and maintenance costs. It’s more than just wanting to be better with maintenance. Property managers can drill down from every point in the ladder of maintenance excellence. Identify the problem so you can improve it. A resident satisfaction issue might be approval speed. If it’s taking too long to get the repairs approved, you need to get into those details instead of running after different things. Don’t do work that doesn’t have an impact. Measuring things allows you to look at problems more critically. There’s a lot to be said for gut instinct, but once you start using data, you have to be methodical. Perhaps you’ve heard the W. Edwards Deming quote: “In God we trust but all others must bring data.” Following your gut is important, especially if you’ve been in this business a long time. It’s probably not ...