Chris Sonino talks with Dale Hayward, maintenance supervisor for 550 units in Ohio, about managing work orders, seasonal issues like snow and HVAC problems, and staffing strategies to cut deferred maintenance and keep residents happy.
Hey, everybody. Welcome to this episode of Real Talk, which is Real Talk for real estate investors is vlog number 59. I am Chris Sonino, the director of property management here at Freedom Real Estate Group, family of companies. I'm joined today with Dale Hayward. He is our maintenance supervisor for Independence Property Management, who manages all the assets here at Freedom. Dale, tell us a little bit about yourself.
I've been in the construction industry for 40 some odd years and also been in the fire service for a chunk of that time, so. And just enjoy working with people and doing. Helping out the tenants. I like that a lot.
Yeah, that's a big jump from fire service to construction. I'm sure you probably did a little bit overlapping.
It was all overlapping. My day job and my. Anytime they call a job.
Yeah, they have interesting schedules in the fire service. Sometimes like three days on, four days off, or vice versa. We have a couple. I have a couple clients and contacts that are in the fire service, so I'm very familiar with their schedules. So, yeah, I commend for that. That's. That's awesome. I mean, I hear that in conversation, but yeah, it's awesome how much of a staple in your life that's been. But now you're in maintenance. You're one of our top dogs in maintenance.
Sometimes I wish I wasn't the top dog in maintenance.
Yeah, there's a lot of responsibility comes with that. But I mean, you've been pretty vital to a lot of stuff we have going on. And I know, like, when you came on initially, like, we had probably 400 work orders in the system, and some of them were repeats and duplicates and just unhappy residents and a little bit of upset tension on the owner side, too. And I know our team was overwhelmed, so bringing you on, like, you were like, all right, let's make this simple. Let's break down what's the simplest and what's the most important thing to do. Let's just start checking boxes. And it's been awesome. Yeah, yeah. And we brought on some help for you. Like you have another gentleman that's helping.
You and really appreciate it. All the help I can get. Yeah, it's again. And that circles back to the fire service. It's. It's you. You see, you see what needs to be done. You have to just go out, you have to step in and do it right. You can't think about it too long. You just have to get in there and do it. And an old adage is, step one, make a plan. Step two, throw away the Plan, Make a new plan.
Yeah, yeah, it's true. And I think we went through several planning to get caught up on some of the things that we had going on. I think we're in a much better position now. There's still a little bit of a work order volume, but we're also in the middle of our cold season and there's a lot of extra H vac stuff and sidewalks and driveways and all those other things that come along with having to remove ice and snow, know. So, yeah, it's, it's, it's quite a bit. So I don't, I don't envy the people in maintenance. It's a, it's a hard job. But you guys, you guys do quite well with it. Yeah. So I'm bringing you on today because we're going to be talking about long term maintenance planning and kind of what we've done, what we're planning to do, uh, to help kind of facilitate that along. But we're going to introduce everybody to you. So when we get into that topic, you know, everybody knows the face. A couple of things that we're going to talk about, there are inspections, how we strategize inspections to be efficient with our crews and the portfolio we manage, which is, you know, nearly 550 units over several counties in Ohio. Gutter services, deferred maintenance items. We touched on landscaping services this week because of the snow. We had as few as well as like, mitigating certain things that we know are going to be coming and kind of strategically planning future expenses and repairs based on like, the demand. All right, so as we get into that, we'll kind of, we'll bring Dale back and we'll, we'll dive into those specifics here. I think that's going to be a podcast be posted here the next few weeks. But like, Dale, I really appreciate you coming in and talking about it and I'm sure that our fans are going to be really eager to hear all the wonderful things that we're working on.
The thing about property management, property maintenance, is that you just have to enjoy your work. You know, you get in there and do it. And I enjoy every day, most, most every day. There are rough days, but even those have light at the end of the tunnel, so.
Yeah, well, I mean, you talk about old adages. There's, there's several that my, my family used to say about when you get comfortable, somebody's going to throw something at you. And that's how, you know, well, dodgeball, they said, you know, I don't know all the D's or dodgeball, but there's dip dodge and several others. You got to keep moving, got to keep going. So you know, it's one of those things. So yeah, I really appreciate you rolling with the punches. And yeah, we're gonna we to do this podcast here shortly and I think our investors and the rest of our listeners are going to be really intrigued to what we're doing and what we have done to try to help mitigate that. Well, we like to end these things with a little call to action a little bit. So I want to end with saying invest smart. Live happy. Live happy.
I was like, I knew it.
Hey, thank you. Appreciate you guys. We'll see you shortly.
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