Centurion Real Estate Management explains why setting clear expectations matters with investor clients. Investors expect non-emergency repairs in 1 to 14 days, but the industry average is 6.1 days. Delays come from owner approvals, vendor availability, tenant scheduling, and internal processes.
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Hi, this video will be about setting expectations. When we start off the relationship with a new investor client, we really want to understand their motivations and what they're trying to achieve, their goals for their property, for the lifetime of their rental property, what their timeline is, and then we want to let them know what they can— what they can expect from us. So setting clear expectations. We found over the years that having a mismatch on those expectations really creates a lot of problems in, um, moving forward. So I found it kind of interesting when looking at some of the responses to a recent survey in regards to how long or what the expectation of investors is, or what they think benchmark is for response for a number of things like maintenance requests. Very interesting that I'll read the question. What do you expect to be the average duration of a work order for a non-emergency item from when a tenant submits all the way to completion? And so the interesting thing is here, everybody wants to respond immediately. And being an investor myself, having managed myself myself early on. There's just times where I couldn't respond right away if I was doing the maintenance, or even, uh, calling in an emergency situation. I couldn't get vendors out there right away. I mean, we were scheduling sometimes week or weeks out, and that's just the reality of things. So even though we have an in-house maintenance team with over a dozen maintenance techs, we can't always get out there like immediately. So interesting though, the data here— this is coming from, uh, data across the United States, real-time data that shows like kind of the actual benchmark speed for non-emergency repairs. Again, emergencies, different category. We are dropping everything, bending the realities of the universe to, uh, get to that tenant's issue and get it resolved as quickly as possible. However, respondents, 5% of respondents said it should be one day, should get over there within one day, which I think that's great again, but in reality, we're gonna see what the data is showing us. 15% of respondents said it should be within two days. 32% said it should be within three days. 18% said within 4 days, 16% said within 5 days, uh, within 6 days, 5%, 7 to 14 days, 7% of respondents picked that category. And then more than 14 days, less, less than 2%, uh, responded. Again, that would be pretty abysmal. However, according to some of the industry benchmarks, the software that's not actually like what the the goal is, but what reality is. And this can get skewed a little bit. It's not a software we personally use here at Centurion, but based on this industry software, they were saying it's 6.1 days. Again, I find that very interesting. The industry benchmark for repairs on non- Emergency maintenance is 6.1 days. Crazy, because here in Oregon, you have to— the law says you have to respond to habitability issues, which is things that concern the livable state of the dwelling unit for the tenant, within 7 days. That doesn't mean you have to resolve it. And again, 6.1 days could be skewed for a number of reasons. Obviously, if that's grouped in with a lot of deferred maintenance or maintenance that generates a work order and it's something that, as a property management company, you know you're not gonna handle right away or you're getting approval from the owner. There's a lot of things that slow down a lot of investors. They have limits in place. They want to know when certain things happen and all of those things slow down the process, the response process. Being reliant on outside vendors slows things down, scheduling with the tenants to actually get it done. Um, and then, um, so again, how quick they respond is not really in this data, uh, and then when they actually close the repair request, um, is, is unsure based on this data, uh, and so sometimes the maintenance team can respond really quick, handle the issue for the tenant, get it resolved, happy tenant, but then on the back end, the repair ticket might not get closed until it's reviewed by a manager or the finance team and then actually get closed out. So there's a number of questions that I have, but it is interesting. I think that a lot of times the expectation doesn't always match reality. Again, it's just a good, good thing to understand. But if you have more questions, we'd love to talk with you. We work really hard here to serve our clients, take care of their properties, help them reach their goals. We'd like to do the same for you. So if you're interested in having a conversation, getting some more information, give us a call today. Thank you.
