What is the value of TIDY for long-term rentals? At a very high level, long-term rental customers have various cleaning and maintenance needs that require attention and work from property owners, managers, or operations teams. The main needs are emergency maintenance, preventative maintenance, and turnovers.
Emergency maintenance needs occasionally pop up for managers. The prototypical example is a pipe bursting, and it needs immediate fixing. How does TIDY help here?
When your customers need to report maintenance issues, you can collect them yourself and send them to TIDY to track as issues, or use TIDY to collect customer reports. We can set up workflows to actually collect requests from your customers, and we have more solutions coming in Q2 2024.
But a maintenance request is made; how do you get the maintenance request out to people? How do you follow up with them to get it done? And that's like our normal list toolset, only, you know, for maintenance needs. So we should be able to do that work. Like if they have a vendor list of, you know, who they would call who they like to use if they don't have anybody in that area, or if somebody is not available, use us to find them a vendor to get it done in an emergency. We're about the best in the world at that type of thing. So we can do all that stuff. So there's value now to the emergency maintenance request situation; there will probably be more value in Q2 as we progress in a few key things we're working on.
Preventative maintenance is a set of scheduled things you do for a property. For property managers, a couple of things are hard about this.
First of all, it is knowing what you need to do. Most people don't track manuals or have any sophisticated schedules. So, developing a preventative maintenance plan is a challenge. It's the first challenge.
The second challenge is tracking what has been done and what needs to be done on a schedule, a calendar. It's not rocket science, but it is hard to actually implement. It's hard enough that only some actually do it. Nobody, actually really, or very few, actually go ahead and have such a schedule.
Large facility management software systems might do this. That's typically reserved for things like universities or large facilities where they really track all the assets.
Finally, there is the scheduling of the jobs and trying to get these preventative maintenance tasks done, which involves sending requests out to the vendors to get them done as they come up on your schedule. And the workflows associated with that. TIDY does all three of those things. It helps you develop preventative maintenance plans based on manuals and other information. They help you schedule and track the maintenance that was done and needs to be done. And they help you solve the workflows to accomplish preventative maintenance.
Property managers often have to perform regular cleaning and maintenance work. The most significant task in this regard is the turnover process. However, the long-term rental turnover process differs from short-term ones in several ways.
For instance, short-term rentals are time-sensitive, meaning the checkout and check-in process happens on the same day. But for long-term rentals, there are usually several days or weeks between one tenant leaving and the next coming in. In long-term rentals, the term "move-out date" is more common, and the lease agreement usually predetermined the move-in and move-out dates.
Although some things can be quicker for apartments, turning over a long-term rental property takes a few days. So, it's unlikely that a property manager will have to turn over a property on the same day in the long-term rental market.
Turnovers are complex processes that involve multiple steps to coordinate and complete. TIDY can provide significant value in this area, and we have a roadmap to enhance our offerings further.
For a long-term rental, the turnover process involves the following steps:
If the turnover process takes a month, for example, there could be a minimum of three jobs scheduled, but it could be as many as ten or more. Coordinating all these tasks can be challenging. TIDY can make the process smoother and more efficient.
So today, we have many tools to set this up. Right now, we can create inspection lists for inspectors, create all the jobs, and coordinate everything. And I would like to add some more like turnover. Sometimes, they call it make ready as well. Another term that some people use is make ready. And that's the process of making it ready for the next person. We want better tracking tools to show that these jobs are linked. That doesn't exist today and say, Oh, these are the 10 jobs in this property make-ready, and you can track them all as one bundle or group. That's an area where we'd like to do some more work. But with concierge tasks, we can do much of that today. But I wanted to talk through, from my perspective, what the value is to long-term rentals; you might need to get me involved in calls and stuff like that to help. Any questions about long-term rentals and how they're different.
TIDY handles turnover coordination, preventative maintenance, and emergency maintenance for most long-term rental customers for just $36 per unit. It is impossible to hire help for less.
There is the opportunity to defray the cost or profit from offering benefits to a property manager/owner's tenants. Depending on how you want to set it up, offering cleanings and other services can be done and set up with TIDY as a revenue share or discount program.
If 10% of the units were to purchase cleanings, for example, and you offered a 20% revenue share, people who purchased cleanings got 1 cleaning per month at $150 each. This would be $150x12x10%x20%=$36, breaking even on the cost of TIDY for many people. Whether this is feasible depends on various factors, including the type of tenants, how much you push it, and what kind of contractual levers you may use to encourage tenants to go through you. Registration requirements, insurance requirements, and other lease contract terms can encourage people to use vendors you suggest instead of others.
Long-term rental customers have various cleaning and maintenance needs that require attention and work from property owners, managers, or operations teams. The main needs are emergency maintenance, preventative maintenance, and turnovers. TIDY can provide significant value in all these areas.
TIDY can help report the issue and fill the request for emergency maintenance. For preventative maintenance, TIDY can help develop a plan, track what has been done and what needs to be done on a schedule, schedule the jobs, and try to get these preventative maintenance tasks done. For turnovers or make-readies, TIDY can create inspection lists, create all the jobs, and coordinate everything to make the process smoother and more efficient.
Comic Relief: We asked ChatGPT to suggest an image for this blog header, and they came up with this. Amazing and horrible at the same time. We are sorry, and you're welcome at the same time.
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