Our experience managing Boise rental homes has demonstrated that maintenance-related issues often cause the most headaches (and the highest expenses) for rental property owners. There’s a lot to worry about, whether it’s a leaking hot water heater or a broken window or a furnace that isn’t providing heat in the middle of a cold winter.
Owners are generally responsible for maintaining the property and taking care of any repairs and replacements. That’s why your maintenance team is so important. You have to choose reliable, trustworthy professionals to take care of emergency, routine, and even preventative maintenance. You’ll want them to provide a high quality of work and offer cost-effective pricing.
At Wave Property Management, we have an incredible team of talented maintenance people that we employ in-house. This provides us and our owners with a lot of benefits.
Emergency Maintenance in Boise Rental Homes
Emergency maintenance is never fun to deal with - it’s disruptive and often expensive. But, it requires an immediate response, otherwise you put your property and your tenant at risk.
During the lease signing process, discuss with your tenant how an emergency should be defined. While a broken handle on the microwave may be inconvenient, it’s not a repair that needs to be addressed in the middle of the night. When something breaks, tenants are going to feel tense, and they’ll have a sense of urgency, especially if it’s a real emergency, like the loss of air conditioning on a hot summer day.
A maintenance emergency is generally anything involving water or flooding. Fires and electrical issues are also considered emergencies, and if your tenant doesn’t have heat in the winter, you need to treat it as an emergency because it’s a habitability issue.
Make sure you’re available 24 hours a day. Our maintenance team can respond immediately to emergencies. We don’t have to frantically look for a vendor at short notice. This is one of the benefits and the important advantages to working with a Boise property management company that employs its own maintenance team.
Routine Repairs for Your Boise Investment Property
During routine repairs that aren’t emergencies, the best thing to do is communicate well with your tenants during the process. Let them know that you’ve received their maintenance request, and give them a reasonable and appropriate timeframe for when you’ll be able to respond.
Many landlords ask their tenants to call when something breaks. That’s important during an emergency, but for routine repairs, you might want to have them put the request in writing. If your tenant emails or texts the repair request, you’ll have it documented.
We don’t delay the routine repairs that tenants request. We’re responsive and quick. Once the work has been completed, follow up with the tenant and make sure everything is working properly.
In-House Maintenance Help
With our professional and responsive maintenance professionals working with us, we can take care of problems right away. We can prioritize the work that needs to be done and make sure you’re not spending more than you should on general repairs and preventative services.
When you’re managing your own rental home, you can’t exactly keep a staff of maintenance professionals. Put together a list of vendors who are reliable, good at what they do, licensed, and insured. Look for affordable pricing, but don’t cut corners. This is your investment property, and you don’t want to damage your ROI or your tenant retention with bad work. It’s important that you find and value the best people who are working to keep your home in good shape.
If you’re interested in hearing more about how we can help you save money and improve the maintenance process with your own Boise rental properties, please contact us at Wave Property Management.
Wave Property Management is a full-service leasing and management company serving Boise as well as nearby communities such as Meridian, Garden City, Nampa, Mountain Home, and Caldwell. We work with new rental property owners as well as established investors with growing real estate portfolios.
