Last week I had the pleasure of speaking at a regional NARPM conference about Solving You Biggest Operational Issue in 30 Days. It was a great event and I loved connecting and providing great information to my fellow NARPM members. As a Broker of my own Property Management business, I know firsthand the troubles and challenges that we all face. However, since I came out of the corporate world of selling IT Consulting, I am all about plugging up the holes with processes and procedures. When we find a problem, we fix it and generally don’t have that issue again.

In my presentation, we were hypothetically walking through the issues with maintenance. If you are a PM, you know the headaches that department can create. It is the number one bone of contention between owners, tenants, and the property manager.  As we were walking through the steps, one of the issues that we talked about was tenant’s expectations being too high. I shared some of the tips we use to help with that as well as some things to help tenants solve their own issues.

By far the biggest “ah ha” moment in the room was the introduction of my Green Tags. Want to know about my green tags? They are how we tag every water cut off so that when a tenant has a leak, they can quickly identify a cut off and turn the water off.

They look like this:

You can easily install them on every cut off. When we do a move in inspection, we explain what they are, show them the main cut off and how they work. Whenever a tenant calls in with a water leak, whether during business hours (which quite frankly never happens) or after hours 99% of the calls, my after hours maintenance people ask the tenants to find the green tags to shut the water off to minimize any further damage.

Funny enough, we had this happen the night before the conference. Tenant called at 7:30 stating that there was a leak, the carpet was soaked, they found the green tag, stopped the water, and called. It works like clockwork. It is amazing how some of the simplest things can have a big impact on your business.

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