Successfully Centralized Maintenance
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How an AI-Driven Regional Model Cuts Costs and Boosts Productivity
By Ken Murai, CEO of FacilGo
As rising costs, labor shortages, and new innovations transform the property management industry, business leaders face a unique opportunity to improve efficiency, reduce expenses, and enhance service quality by centralizing their maintenance operations. FacilGo has helped clients upgrade from property-level maintenance teams to a centralized, technology-driven approach that is increasingly necessary for residential property management teams of all sorts.
On a recent podcast with Dom Beveridge of 20 for 20 , I discussed leveraging centralized maintenance to drive savings and improve services. In this article, I’ll explain why centralization matters, how to switch over, and the potential impact on a property management company’s bottom line.
Why centralize maintenance?
The traditional maintenance model relies on on-site teams handling work orders. This reactive approach wastes resources in multiple ways:
- Staff at low-demand properties don’t have enough to do, while teams at high-demand properties are overwhelmed
- Keeping the best technicians at a specific location leads to inconsistent service quality across a portfolio.
- Some properties experience longer response times without optimized scheduling.
- If specialists are restricted to a specific property, specialized repairs in other properties require expensive outsourcing.
The process and the benefits
So how can a multifamily operator streamline and coordinate their maintenance operations through centralization, and what are the positive outcomes?
Standardize work order intake and triage: Instead of wasting team member resources and risking human error on every maintenance request, use AI-powered log requests by phone or online chat portals. These systems automatically categorize issues and prioritize urgent repairs, while offering self-service troubleshooting to help residents resolve minor issues on their own.
Use a regional maintenance team: Instead of one team at each property, develop a regional model where teams and technicians visit properties based on demand. HVAC, plumbing, and electrical specialists can go where they’re needed, reducing outsourcing costs and improving service quality across a portfolio.
Optimize scheduling and workforce deployment: AI-powered dispatching software assigns jobs based on technician availability and expertise, optimizing routes to minimize travel time across properties. Dynamically balanced workloads can prevent bottlenecks in high-demand areas, ensuring work orders require less time, capital, and worker stress.
Adopt a data-driven outsourcing strategy: Some outsourcing is inevitable, even with a centralized team. AI can make outsourcing more strategic and less reactive by:
- Analyzing data to determine when to outsource.
- Negotiating vendor contracts in bulk to reduce costs.
- Automating outsourcing for emergency after-hours repairs.
Track and improve performance with technology: Centralized maintenance helps users collect and analyze data across their portfolio. Real-time work order tracking monitors job progress and performance, performance analytics identifies trends and improves resource distribution, and automated reporting evaluates cost savings and suggests improvements.
Empowering scalable growth
If every property requires a dedicated maintenance team, then every new property means hiring, training, and maintaining another workforce. But a centralized maintenance model means the maintenance team only needs to grow enough to efficiently service each new property. New personnel can train under veteran staff without needing to reassign anyone or upset team dynamics.
Scaling a residential property business becomes much easier when new properties can seamlessly integrate into a regional service model, with maintenance procedures standardized across an entire portfolio. Centralized teams also adapt better to changing service demands across a growing portfolio.
Centralized maintenance is on the rise
Companies across the residential management industry are already embracing AI, automation, and regionalized service models to gain an edge in cost efficiency, workforce productivity, and resident satisfaction.
FacilGo helps companies seamlessly transition to a centralized and regional maintenance model to future-proof their operations and maximize NOI. I will be sharing my insights about centralization in a series of blogs.
If you’re ready to modernize your maintenance strategy now, let’s talk!
