Maintenance Centralization

Welcome to the first episode of HOT TAKES for MF’ERS. Our first HOT TAKE? You need another multifamily podcast. Despite what you hear at conferences, our industry is wrestling with big, old, unresolved problems—and we need a place to discuss fresh, unconventional approaches.

We’re keeping it simple: 15 minutes. No fluff. No filler. Just spicy (and specific) takes. Caren Maio, Remen Okoruwa, Lindsay Martinez, Brent Loomer, and Troy Crema have all recorded their episodes and are wondering why we still haven’t hit publish.

But for this very first one, David and I tackle a question that’s been top of mind: Is maintenance centralization really that hard?

Check out the episode below, and if you like what you hear, subscribe to stay in the loop on LinkedIn. We’re excited to have you join the conversation—and reshape what’s possible in the multifamily world.

Summary

In this premiere episode of Hot Takes for MFer's, hosts Sunny Juneja and David Thomas dive deep into the complexities of maintenance centralization in multifamily properties. David shares his "hot take" on why centralizing maintenance is often misunderstood and reveals insights on streamlining workflows across dispersed properties. From managing work orders to optimizing tech resources, this episode sheds light on the critical factors for improving resident satisfaction and operational efficiency. They discuss:

• Key steps to successful maintenance centralization

• The "assembly line" approach to managing work orders

• Real-world examples, including a major transformation at Veritas during COVID

• The importance of follow-up, data collection, and resident feedback

• Practical advice for property owners and operators on achieving higher ROI through centralized maintenance

If you’re in multifamily property management or simply curious about industry innovations, this episode is packed with actionable insights. Got questions or stories on centralization? Reach out to Sunny (sunny@canopyanalytics.com) or David (david@transformre.co) to join the conversation.

Transcript

David:

I don't wanna give away too much of our secret sauce, but through creative ways to ask questions, through a communication method of the resident's choice, we get a very, very, very high response rate from our residents on what they thought of that particular work.

Sunny:

Would you share, I know it's like three questions, would you share one of the questions that's a secret or no?

And that's okay if it's a no.

David:

Call me if you wanna know, how about that?

Sunny:

So, this is Hot Takes Podcast for MFers, the hottest takes in multifamily you can think of.

And today we're doing an episode with David Thomas, my co-host and good friend.

And he's got a really hot take on maintenance centralization.

David, hit us with your hot take.

David:

I hope it's a hot take.

I think maintenance centralization is greatly misunderstood.

I think it's, when you think about centralization, people think maintenance is the most difficult to do.

And I think that's because people think of, as a company, you're thinking of centralization as people and geographies to a certain extent.

But I think maintenance centralization is a lot more than just the people and geographies.

There's absolutely an aspect of it of, do I have an onsite maintenance tech, do I not?

Is that person traveling to multiple properties or not?

How far are those properties?

I've talked to many of the groups I work with about, hey, I've got properties in Nashville and Houston and Atlanta, I can't centralize maintenance.

And I don't think that's right.

I think you absolutely can, but different parts of that maintenance journey.

And I think when you dissect everything from the maintenance, the first work order coming in from a resident, right, and their experience and their journey, all the way through the very end of that work order being done, the invoicing, the accounting, the tracking, the data collection, through asset management, budgeting, reviewing, it's such a long, complex process.

And so many people could be impacted by a single work order that you have to think of centralization more than just the people on site and the geographies that you're located in.

Sunny:

Yeah, so I would say that's a very spicy, hot take.

So this is gonna be our first episode on centralization of Several.

And I would say of all the conversations we have, both with the operators and the maintenance people and the prop tech vendors, there is a sort of universal agreement that maintenance centralization is the hardest, and some people just don't think it's possible, right?

And so I think your take is very, very spicy here.

And I think for me, what I hear a lot from people is like you said, people are worried about how do you get this tech who's handling one thing to go to the right next place, and you're claiming it's a little bit more than that.

Maybe it's helpful just really slowly, like break it down for me, what are the parts of the maintenance kind of, let's call it, we use this term a lot, me and David, the assembly line, what part of the assembly line is there and what part is the part people should focus on centralizing?

David:

Yeah, I think removing the physical work that has to be done, because that still has to be done by a person on the property going to do that job.

Today, the tech's not there to eliminate that.

The parts that you're centralizing, kind of that assembly line, tech has to be involved.

Step one is a work order is generated.

And maybe things get a bit interesting if that work order is automatically generated.

Do you have some leak detection devices?

Do you have some way to preventively know something's going wrong?

And you're getting things faster before residents know about it in some cases.

And not to spend a lot of time dwelling on step by step, but fast forwarding ahead from that initial response, how something's coming in, what it is, digesting that information, using your existing data to make an informed decision about how you're gonna tackle that.

A lot of groups I work with, we call them maintenance coordinators, right?

Someone who's intaking that data, they're figuring out the next step, whether it's a third party GC, an internal maintenance tech who's gonna take that.

Then you have your dispatcher deployment, right?

The routing, getting people to the spot that it needs to happen at the right time with permission to access and the codes to get in and all those things.

Physical work is done.

There's a lot of tracking that's involved there, your time, your materials, how you're invoicing that.

There's a whole other world of your maintenance techs and training and gamification and tracking them.

And there's a lot that goes into that as well.

Then the completion of the work order.

Was the resident satisfied?

Did they do a good job?

What kind of data can you learn from that process?

And then you get back to the back office again.

The payment of that invoice, the tracking of the invoice, the collection of the data, what did you learn from that?

Is that same fridge that you have in 100 units going bad over and over again?

Is there a warranty?

There's a lot on the back end that you could do with that data to learn to make better decisions going forward as well.

Sunny:

So what I think I hear you say is like, it's not just like fixing something.

There's a lot to getting a work order done.

And not enough people are thinking about those parts both before the work order is opened, while the work order is open, and then happening with dispatching, then after the fact, right?

I think you hit a lot of stuff there that we could go deep on and probably do an episode on each one.

But you've done centralized maintenance in your own company, you've kind of done it.

What's the upside?

What do you get if you start focusing on those parts and why should an owner even bother doing it?

Like, why is the juice worth the squeeze?

David:

Absolutely, I think, and I'll put this in two buckets.

There's unit turnovers, and then there's the kind of resident request maintenance that needs to be done.

Turnovers, we've seen a very clear improvement in centralized efforts in that you're reducing turn time, you're getting things done cheaper, you have standardized scopes, you can buy supplies at scale.

A lot of those things that owners are doing in bits and pieces today, but when you control your destiny with centralization, you could really do more of that more efficiently.

On the resident side, I'd say, ultimately, it comes down to resident satisfaction.

Are you getting to that resident quickly, answering them, being responsive, getting the job done, doing it right by the right tech?

The first person who goes out is the right person to do it.

You don't have someone who shows up the next day and has to bring someone else.

And that could be another couple days, and it drags on.

Also, inventory parts, knowing...

This is a bit easier in new construction, let's say, where you've got the same fridge across the board and the same angle stops across the board.

But in a San Francisco, a New York, a Los Angeles, a Boston, you've got 50, 60, 70-year-old multifamily buildings with all different parts, everything's different.

You can't always show up with the right part on the right time.

So how do you make that more efficient?

How do you track that?

How do you get supplies to the person who needs them?

I think there's a lot of interesting ways to dissect all of that as you go along.

Sunny:

Cool.

All right, David, I don't wanna put you on the spot, but I'm gonna put you on the spot.

We didn't really prep for this.

We just sort of jumped into it.

So if you don't have this, it's okay.

Give me one specific metric that at Veritas or any other company you've worked with that when you guys did maintenance, you saw it started at A, ended up at B. This is why it was worth it.

David:

Interesting.

You put me on the spot.

I don't have a metric in my head, but I'll give you an amazing example of why this was successful when I worked with Veritas.

During COVID in a city like San Francisco where Veritas is based, we had very stringent COVID restrictions.

And what we were finding was we still had to perform maintenance, but our third-party vendors that we relied on so heavily, we tried to tell them, hey, you gotta wear a mask, you gotta do these certain things, but getting them to adhere to that was difficult.

We didn't have control over our third-party vendors.

And so we realized to provide the best customer service we could, we have to bring this in-house.

We have to do it ourselves.

At the time, I think we maybe had three to 10, that range of maintenance techs on our staff with around, let's call it, five maintenance coordinators on staff.

And those maintenance coordinators were spending most of their time sending out work orders via email to third-party contractors.

Through our centralization efforts, through the tech that Veritas built in-house, we were able to scale from, you know, less than 10 maintenance techs to, I think we're up to 140 today, servicing both the Veritas world of residents as well as third-party clients as well.

And the amazing thing is, we still have those same five maintenance coordinators today.

So we were able to scale five maintenance coordinators with only, call it, 10 techs, all the way to five maintenance coordinators with 140 techs.

And that was all through this great centralization model that we built, relying on in-house tech that we built with some great outside resources, HappyCo and others that we work with to get that done.

Sunny:

All right, that's a great metric.

I mean, that's a phenomenal story.

I mean, you know, you definitely have that on the spot.

All right, so let's keep getting the specifics.

This is very juicy, right?

So like, I think you've given us a couple of good ideas about like, how do you start maintenance centralization?

Why it's more possible?

Why it's more possible?

Why there's more upside?

Why there's more parts of the thing, right?

So let's say it's me and you, we're going to this new operator.

They're an owner-operator or a third-party manager, with like, say, 3,000 to 7,000 units, like a good mid-market, pretty large-size owner, okay?

What are you gonna tell them to first start?

And what's the first thing you're gonna tell them to like, the easiest, simplest thing, maybe not the simplest, but the thing where it's, hey, you put in a dollar in, you get $3 back out.

Where would you kind of suggest them to start with?

David:

Oh, good question.

Something that I found, it's intuitive when you say it, but it was a bit, you know, we unlocked something magical when we figured this out at Veritas.

Resident follow-up is key, right?

And I was talking to someone recently from a, Sonny and I actually had a great meeting with one of the larger operators.

Sunny:

Don't say their name.

David:

I won't say their name.

One of the larger operators in the US, and I was asking about this, and they said, well, yeah, we ask for reviews for all of our techs.

We, you know, train them to leave a little card on the kitchen table.

And we asked the resident to fill out how great of a job our tech did.

And it kind of struck me as, well, you know, that's what everyone's been doing for a hundred years on maintenance techs.

And, you know, how often does anyone fill out one of those cards and give it back to you?

Never.

So we created an interesting system to, and I don't want to give away too much of our secret sauce, but through creative ways to ask questions, through a communication method of the resident's choice, we get a very, very, very high response rate from our residents on what they thought of that particular work.

And the way we're able to gather that data and the way we're able to do it, it both makes sure that our resident was happy and we did a great job and we solved that problem, or it's gonna collect data on what we didn't do and what we didn't solve and better inform us for what we need to go back and do better, or going back to the first piece, if we did a great job, we use that to then rank our maintenance techs and say, hey, we know this particular maintenance tech did an amazing job on a hardwood floor repair.

And so the next time a hardwood floor repair comes up, we're gonna make sure that tech's prioritized for that type of job.

And so using that data, we're able to make sure that the right techs go to the right job, they're consistent, they're good, the residents like the work that's being done.

It's not just something that we saw that they could do early on in an application process, in an interview, or in their past.

We're constantly updating that.

And I think just focusing on that little piece of the follow-up and the data collection there, I don't wanna say it's simple, but that one piece of the entire maintenance journey is game-changing.

Sunny:

Got it.

Would you share, I know it's like three questions, would you share one of the questions that's a secret, or no, and that's okay if it's a no?

David:

You know, it's not...

Call me if you wanna know, how about that?

Sunny:

There you go, okay.

David doesn't wanna make it public, he doesn't want everybody to know, but call him if you're interested.

I think that's a reasonable answer.

Okay, cool.

So what I heard there is like, one thing is get people to respond to surveys, maybe in an automated way, right?

You gotta get your engagement to figure out that.

And then using that data to help specialize your team so that the right person does the right job.

Like if someone happens to be really good at carpentry, you know that they're gonna be good at like all these hardwood jobs, right?

And you saw, I saw a lot of upside on doing that kind of just as a beginning, right?

One thing I wanna ask is like, a lot of people do a call center and like a centralized sort of that.

Is that centralization or is that cheap centralization?

Like how do you, like, what do you think there?

Because I think a lot of people have a centralized call center and they're like, is this good enough?

Or is that not a good enough?

David:

I think it's a step, right?

One of my goals and everything I do with centralization is response time.

Every study, every metric in the world shows response time matters.

And that's just intuitive.

If you ever managed a property, you know if you don't get back to your residents, they're not happy.

So whatever you as a company need to do to make sure you have good response time, whether that's, you know, a third party call center, offshore resources, someone on staff who's got the phone on the weekend, whatever that is, absolutely, you gotta do it.

You gotta keep that response time.

Sunny:

Got it.

But to you, that's not good enough.

That's just the bare minimum.

David:

It's a start.

Sunny:

Okay, great, cool.

All right, we're keeping these episodes short.

So we're at 13 and a half minutes right now.

David, we're gonna do another one of these episodes because I heard like 500 things I wanted to follow up on.

But thank you for today.

Any final words for our audience?

David:

I'm excited to get Hot Takes for MFRs going.

And as you said, I hope this is the first of many.

Sunny:

Great.

We're gonna be doing a lot of episodes on centralization.

If you have a centralization question or you have a story you want to share, please do reach out.

We're available.

I'll kind of drop our, I'll just say it's sunny at canopyanalytics.com.

Sunny, like it's a sunny day.

And then if you want to reach David, it's david at transformcre.co.

Both pretty easy ones to remember.

See you all soon.

Bye.