How Preventive Maintenance Saves You Money and Headaches

Owning investment property is a hands-on business. Of course as a property owner you know that already. One of the reasons you prefer real estate as an investment is that you have infinitely more control over it than you do other investments. When you send a check off to the stock broker, you hope your stock goes up. No control–you just cross your fingers that the owners and managers of the company will do right by you and the other shareholders.

With rental property you have direct control over its condition and profitability. In addition to the tenants you select, you determine what gets fixed when and the improvements you make. In fact, you're probably pretty good at keeping your property in tip-top shape.

Even so, sometimes it all gets away from you. It seems as if you're throwing money at a property every other day. There's an old saying: "everything happens at once with nothing in between." That's the way rental property is sometimes. The calls that something has broken and needs to be fixed right now come almost incessantly.

It doesn't have to be that way.

Most repair problems go away with a carefully thought out and planned Preventive Maintenance program. If you go back through your records and otherwise do a little research, you will get a pretty good idea how long things last. From roofs to the paint on the walls, from carpets to toilet seats, everything has a life expectancy. By doing preventive maintenance you plan when things are to be repaired, updated and replaced, rather than leaving it to the whim of the thing that needs fixing.

At the beginning of the year–or right now, if you really get inspired– make a list of all the major systems in your properties. Next, find out how often they need to be tended to, either as a repair or replacement. If you had your druthers, when would be the best time to tend to them, before or after they broke, on your schedule or theirs, and what time of year?

For example, an oil furnace will last 30 years or more. But, left to its own devices, the burner will quit on you every couple of years. Of course, it always quits on the coldest day of the year right before a long weekend. So it pays to have the oil furnace repairman do a preventive maintenance visit once a year. Do you do that in the dead of winter? No, that's when the furnaces break. In the summer, repairmen are dying for work and are often much cheaper. So plan to have any preventive maintenance done then.

Do an inspection of your properties looking for things that are likely to be needing repair soon, and put them on a list. Finally, create a reasonable budget for maintenance for the coming year.
Without a preventive maintenance program everything would still be repaired and maintained just as well as it does with one. The difference is, with a preventive maintenance program you are taking charge of the time frames and the costs. That means that you don't get as many late-night, holiday-eve phone calls and surprises.

It is simply more businesslike (and cheaper) to plan repairs rather than react to them. Part of taking charge of your rental property is taking charge of its maintenance, rather than the maintenance taking charge of you.

Why Good PM Is Good PR

You probably take pretty good care of your rental properties, keep them in excellent repair, keep common areas looking great, make the exteriors shine, and have a regular preventive maintenance schedule.

You know what the only problem is? Nobody knows about it. Good landlord do lots of PM (Preventive Maintenance), but they rarely use the PM to generate good PR (Public Relations). Your tenants don't know what a great job you're doing unless you tell them. You could have the best preventive maintenance program in the world, but if you keep it a secret, you are losing out on a great opportunity– the opportunity of keeping great tenants.

Great tenants are like gold. You never want them to move. Here you've done a terrific job making sure that only good tenants live in your rental properties, but you may not be doing everything you can to ensure that they stay. Since it's seven times more expensive to get a new customer than to keep the old one, doing good PR can pay big dividends. Letting your good tenants know what a terrific job you are doing for them will let them know what an outstanding landlord you are and keep them out of the notion of moving just because they don't know how much you care.

The best part–it doesn't require much effort to toot your own horn. Here are some things you can do:
1. Tell them about your Preventive Maintenance Program. Just send a letter to all your tenants describing what you do to keep their homes looking the way they'll be proud to live in them.

2. Send out a questionnaire asking for their wish list for making their homes even better. Be prepared, though. When you get the replies, you need to take action not only to correct the problems your tenants are concerned about, but to let them know the time frame in which you will do it. Otherwise the good PR you worked for goes in the tank.

3. Publish the results of the questionnaire for all your tenants to see. It doesn't have to be specific, only a general discussion of what your tenants said they would like to see happen.

4. Do interior inspections two or three times a year and exterior inspections once or twice a month. Always use a checklist when you do the inspections. Then tell your tenants what you are going to do and when.

Remember, being even a little bit better puts you head and shoulders above your competition in the minds of your customers. Doing good PR about your PM program is one of those ways to get your head a little higher than other landlords'.