Why Maintenance Tracking is Beneficial to HOAs

Written by Warren Wu Posted On Tuesday, 08 October 2019 05:30

Homeowner Association property management can be a daunting task; however, there are ways to make it easier. One of the most efficient ways to make managing an HOA easier is to add maintenance tracking to your program of maintenance. The reason why maintenance tracking is efficient for HOAs is that maintenance tracking allows you to schedule preventive maintenance, recognize strains on your budget, reduce costs, and improve the efficiency of your team.

Schedule Preventative Maintenance Easier

Preventative maintenance is a key component of ensuring the proper working order of all your systems and equipment. This includes things like pest control, pools, filter changes, water pipes, and monthly landscaping tasks to ensure the continual beauty of the community for your homeowners. When people are part of an HOA, they long for beautiful and serene common areas and do not like to see signs of wear and tear on their community.

When you add a maintenance tracking program to your HOA, it makes preventative maintenance, like monthly lawn care, easier to schedule. Maintenance tracking software, like a CMMS, allows HOA property management teams to have the ability to schedule maintenance on an easier timeline. These programs allow you to input manufacturer maintenance schedule information and will automate scheduling for the team allowing management to focus on the many other important tasks.

Reveals Drains on the Maintenance Funds

It may not seem like it is worth the expense, but preventative maintenance is very valuable to a controlled maintenance budget. With maintenance tracking, your HOA can easily see the time and expense used on each preventative maintenance task, like servicing the water pipes or pumps on a regular basis. While it might seem like a drain on expenses to keep maintaining the pool in cooler months, it can be a task that saves money. This is especially true when you can see the cost in a maintenance tracking form that identifies that information for you easily. 

In addition to tracking the cost and hours spent on preventative maintenance tasks like checking and changing pool filters, you can also track the hours and cost of things like repairing broken water pumps due to neglected preventative pool maintenance. This in-depth tracking allows homeowners associations, to easily give examples of why preventative maintenance is a key component of keeping track of the budget to all members of the HOA and maintenance workers.  This way you can show how monthly maintenance has saved thousands of dollars compared to the cost of having a plumber repair burst water pipes. 

Helps Reduce Maintenance Costs

In addition, to helping to reveal drains on your maintenance budget and remove them, you can help to reduce costs. If you have the groundskeeping crew and another separate crew checking on the various maintenance needs of your grounds, like the storm drains, you may find that two different people are being paid to inspect the same items. This will inflate costs significantly over time. To reduce this, you need to schedule maintenance tasks better based upon who is more likely to be better at doing the task. 

With the example of storm drains, rather than send out an entirely different team out to check them, schedule inspection as part of the monthly or quarterly duties of your team. By checking the regular duties of the various maintenance teams that comprise your overall maintenance unit, you will be able to see redundant tasks and even equipment that no longer needs to be a part of your expenses. This will help to reduce the maintenance costs without having to reduce the quality of care that your HOA provides. 

Improves Efficiency of Maintenance Team

With the addition of maintenance tracking, especially the type of software programs that allow for team collaboration and review, you can allow the team to see what places are needing more care than others. Some places will need more care and others will have fallen behind in care because of lack of oversight. However, with the addition of maintenance tracking, each team will have the opportunity to see where they have spent more time than others. 

This additional layer of oversight takes pressure off of management and allows the teams to see how to better serve the community in their efforts. For example, a maintenance team might spend a lot of time ensuring the pristine beauty of community gazebos while only thinking of the roofing of community property on occasion. After a while, the gazebos will still look amazing while the community property roofs sit in disrepair. With proper maintenance tracking, you can see the amount of hours spent on a particular problem and adjust levels of care to ensure that all problems get the level of care they need to be perfect for your community. 

By adding maintenance tracking you are able to change your community for the positive. It can make problems easier to see with the constant stream of trackable data. It alleviates pressure from management and allows teams to coordinate easily. Overall, if you aren’t tracking your maintenance, you aren’t being as efficient as possible.

 


warrenwuWarren Wu leads growth at UpKeep, a CMMS software company that was designed to empower empower maintenance teams to make better decisions from data-driven insights.

Rate this item
(0 votes)

Agent Resource

Limited time offer - 50% off - click here

Realty Times

From buying and selling advice for consumers to money-making tips for Agents, our content, updated daily, has made Realty Times® a must-read, and see, for anyone involved in Real Estate.