The Data-Driven Truth About Property Maintenance: Speed, Satisfaction, and the Future of Repairs
New industry benchmarks reveal how faster repairs, AI-driven maintenance, and cost management strategies are shaping the future of property management. Are you keeping up?
If you’ve been reading this publication very long, you’ve figured out that I love data. I don’t care how funny and interesting your anecdote is, if you don’t have hard data behind it, it ain’t worth my time. So when industry reports come out with solid data, I’m all over it. You’ll remember I recently did an article talking about conclusions drawn from a survey of property owners, and I wanted to do a similar deep-dive into some recent maintenance data from a report released by Property Meld, probably the biggest repository of PM maintenance and repair data on earth at this point.
The Big Trends
Overall, the report spotlights these major trends:
Repairs are getting done faster
Resident satisfaction regarding maintenance is improving
Repair costs are increasing, but PMs are doing a solid job of minimizing the impact on their clients
Let’s look at each of these in more depth, as I always argue that maintenance is THE most important aspect of your PM operation.
Repair Speeds Are Improving
Let’s be honest, the big property management accounting softwares have always done a crappy job of handling maintenance. Yes, some of them have improved over the years, and Rentvine has probably done the best job of building out a solid maintenance platform in their software, but we really have Property Meld to thank for starting widespread industry tracking of these statistics that most softwares for some reason have never tracked in any effective way. And I will always argue that this number is more important than any other: speed of repair.
When we look at the report, we see that repair speed was up to 6 days in January of this year, but that seems to be a temporary uptick due to a temporary increase in the after-holidays service requests. When we look at the overall trend for all of 2024, we see a solid improvement. January of last year was at 6.1 days, but the year ended at 5.1 days in December. While it’s true that there are fewer work orders in December due the holidays, it’s also true that there are fewer available days to get repairs done in that month due to the same holidays, so efficiency tends to be lower. Being able to achieve a full day faster over the course of the year was impressive. And then when we look at this January compared to last January, we still see a small improvement even during the peak after-holiday rush.
This is important, because it’s telling you that if you aren’t seeing this same improvement in your own business, you need to level up your maintenance game. Your competition is improving how fast they get repairs done, and aside from needing more space, the #1 issue that residents point to when not renewing a lease is maintenance. Preventing resident turnover prevents owner churn, because owners tend to leave when the property is vacant. Therefore, faster repair speed equals lower owner churn, which equals a more profitable operation. You need to be laser focused on this number in your operation. For reference, this is what our Property Meld dashboard shows for my own PM company on this metric:
Like the report shows of the industry, we jumped up a day, but we’re still beating the industry. My KPI benchmark for our maintenance department is 5 days for the median and 6 days for the average, so we’re beating both considerably. If you’re not, make this a priority.
Speed Equals Satisfaction
When we look at the report’s metrics for resident satisfaction, we can see how this plays out. Average resident satisfaction from repairs is now up to 4.3 stars, an improvement from last year. And while you might say that going from 4.2 to 4.3 isn’t much, I would ask you to go see how easy it is to get your Google review average up by 0.1 stars. You’re likely to spend the next year battling to make it happen. These shifts aren’t easy, and when we see them as long-term trends, as we do in this case, it really means something.
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I like how the report drills down to a specific high-priority repair to show how this works. Focusing on just one repair type, a toilet repair, the report shows that average time to repair is 4.0 days, which makes it the third fastest repair category. And what is the resident satisfaction rating on that type of repair? An incredible 4.93 stars. If you have Property Meld’s Insights Pro, you can do this drill-down analysis yourself on your own portfolio. I’m willing to bet that you’ll see in your own data that the faster the work is done on a specific repair category, the higher the resident satisfaction for that same repair category.
I can’t emphasize enough how important this is to resident retention. Conventional wisdom in the industry is that raising rent is the #1 reason that tenants don’t renew a lease. I looked for a solid source of data that supports that claim and couldn’t find any. Oh, there are lots of articles that claim it. But none of them that I could find had any actual data behind it. On the other hand, I did find some actual data that refutes it. In 2019, Avail conducted a survey of 1,100+ tenants asking them why they didn’t renew their lease. The results are in this chart below:
As we can see, rent increases actually ranked low, at only about 3% of tenants choosing not to renew because of their rent going up. There were 10% who said the existing rent was already too high, but not anything you can really do about that. The tenant just misjudged how much they could afford originally, and you’re certainly not going to drop the rent below market to accommodate them. The rest of the reasons were mostly things you can’t fix. You can’t reasonably really the amount of space or change the location of the property, and you can’t do anything to prevent a tenant needing to move out of state or to a different area within state. Those reasons total up to a grand total of nearly 30% of non-renewals. That’s TEN TIMES the number who are not renewing because of your rent increase. So stop fretting over rent increases. They aren’t causing non-renewals (within reason).
But look at property maintenance. This is the #2 reason for non-renewal, behind only a need for more space. In other words, this is the top reason for non-renewal that you are actually able to control. And I’m willing to bet that the category for “I don’t like the landlord” has a fair amount of people mixed in who only hate the landlord because they’re not getting repairs done in a timely fashion. If we want to maximize renewals (which minimizes client churn), then we need to focus on repairs.
A Mixed Bag on Costs
We’ve all felt the sting of inflation since Covid. Repair costs have particularly seen big increases. I’m sure I’m not the only one who can remember sub-$4,000 HVAC system replacements. That doesn’t seem all that long ago, but now our average cost is running closer to double that. This is driven by both parts and labor costs going up at a shocking rate, especially in the major trades like HVAC and plumbing. So it’s not surprising that we’ve seen the average maintenance spend per month increase by nearly $10 per unit over the past year.
That said, the data is mixed on this. While maintenance spend is up, the spend PER WORK ORDER is actually slightly down. Property Meld attributes this to more efficient maintenance operations, but I’m not so sure. It could also be attributed to deferred maintenance from the Covid years on smaller items just now starting to get fixed, meaning more smaller work orders spreading the average spend out. Overall, I’d like to see more granular data on this to draw any firm conclusions, so hopefully we’ll continue to get good information out from Meld and other sources.
AI Enters Maintenance
Another item that remains to be seen how influential it will be going forward in the maintenance arena is AI. Property Meld recently rolled out MAX after acquiring Mezo, and Meld believes that the data is showing improved troubleshooting and fewer necessary work orders as a result. But this isn’t just coming from Property Meld. Other maintenance-related vendors are also in the AI game. EZRepair Hotline1, a maintenance hotline and coordination company that’s been in our space for many years now, has also invested heavily into AI workflows and troubleshooting. There are at least several other vendors also branching into AI, including giants like Appfolio who have invested heavily into AI integrations into their property management platform. While all of these initial forays into AI are still nascent at this point, I don’t think there’s any doubt that they show enormous promise and will become part of any efficient maintenance operation going forward. If you’re still tacking your maintenance operation using paper work orders and taking your own maintenance phone calls, you are going to be in a world of hurt in the not-too-distant future. You will simply not be able to compete in the new modern environment. It’s time to start embracing technology in maintenance.
Key Takeaways
Overall, these are the key takeaways I think you should keep in mind after reading this report:
Track your repair speeds (both average and median) religiously and talk about them at company meetings
Set reasonable benchmarks for these numbers and hold your team to them
Audit your negative reviews that stem from repairs so you can find where the problems are. If you aren’t doing better than 4.0 stars on average, you have a major problem on your hands that needs immediate action to correct.
Experiment with AI-enabled tools to assist with maintenance coordination if your budget will allow for it. An easy way to do this is to use Property Meld with MAX and/or EZRepair Hotline, as they have ready-made AI solutions for this.
Prevention is key. A work order that never has to happen is always going to lead to higher resident satisfaction than one that gets fixed, even if fixed quickly. This means a combination of preventative maintenance strategies such as HVAC annual tune-ups, along with effective troubleshooting to solve problems without the need for a vendor to go out.
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I have a minority ownership stake in EZRepair Hotline after merging my own maintenance hotline company, Always There Repair, into EZ a couple of years ago.