One of the best things about digitizing your property management, leasing and other operations is all the data you can collect and analyze. You can track your NOI, the ROI of certain investments and your forecasting accuracy, just to name a few benefits of comprehensive reporting.
But there are also some less obvious benefits of reporting that help you boost employee performance, better manage your assets and increase operations efficiency. All you need is a solid reporting solution and a little creativity.
1. Identify coaching opportunities
As a property owner, you can’t be everywhere at once — or keep an eye on every employee to see how you can best manage them. That’s where reporting can help. By tracking stats like time to turn, resident satisfaction scores and the number of service requests closed, you can get a good picture of a maintenance technician’s performance. Zoom out to community-wide metrics, and you can identify coaching opportunities for your managers, too.
Because you’ll be able to see where an employee is doing well, you can praise and reward them appropriately. And because you can see where they might fall behind their peers, you can pair them with teammates who excel in those areas of need or schedule additional training for them.
Reporting features to use:
Tasks by assignee
Work order maintenance ratings
Time-to-turn
2. Predict repairs before inspections catch them
Regular inspections and equipment audits are important for keeping an eye on your assets, but failures don’t follow a schedule. No matter how diligent your team is, it can feel impossible to keep up with unanticipated repairs. But if you’re steadfast in your reporting, you can keep an eye out for trends and sometimes get ahead of the maintenance curve with strategic preventative maintenance.
Leverage your data by comparing resident-reported and staff-reported tasks to see which activities might be managed better. If residents report more waste management needs than your staff does, it may be time to adjust your trash-collecting policies. Meanwhile, if technicians regularly discover additional unrelated issues while making in-unit repairs, it could be a sign that residents aren’t reporting problems as they notice them. You might need to make it easier to submit service requests.
Reporting features to use:
Open/closed resident tasks
Open/closed tasks
3. Debrief after an emergency
Late-night plumbing calls and weekend HVAC failures are part of the game when it comes to managing your communities. In the moment, it’s all about fixing the issue as fast as possible. But afterward you and your team can learn how to reduce future emergencies and tackle them more efficiently when they happen.
Many emergencies happen after hours or are resolved before your entire team becomes aware of them. Use reporting to loop in your team and discuss improvement and prevention strategies.
Reporting features to use:
Urgent and past-due tasks
Closed tasks
Scorecard
4. Streamline frequent and repetitive tasks
Proptech can automate repetitive tasks. That’s one of the ways it makes your teams more efficient. But you can’t automate everything. Some things just need a human mind to plan and execute. The best way to know which tasks smart tools can take off your team’s plate is to lean on your reporting.
Look for tasks that repeat over time. If you see trends in how often they repeat and what solutions are commonly used to fix the issue, you can create automations that add the task and any necessary notes to the team’s regular routines. Automatically generate to-do lists and save time on creating work orders.
Reporting features to use:
Closed tasks
Closed resident tasks
Scorecard
5. Train employees on task reporting
Reports are only as good as the data they draw from, and chances are you're not the one collecting critical information each day about your communities, assets and residents. Your site teams are, too. How your staff documents tasks can have a huge impact on your understanding of assets, labor and resident satisfaction.
How do you know if your data could be better? Compare reported information across different employees. If you see significant differences between each person’s data, it could be due to differences in how each person reports that information. It might be time to establish data-tracking procedures and train your team on them.
Reporting features to use:
Comparison inspection
Get creative with your reporting
Robust reporting and data-analysis tools are critical to running your multifamily communities smoothly and efficiently. Not all solutions have all the features you’ll need. After all, we’ve based these tips on SmartRent’s products. But, to get you where you want to be, you might find a few solutions that integrate well with each other or with SmartRent.
The point is to get creative with your reporting and leverage your data to see your business in new ways. That creativity could help you solve problems you didn’t even know you had — and boost you above your competition.