Why Does My Property Manager Require Certain Maintenance?
Because sometimes the best maintenance call is the one we never have to make.
It’s a fair question.
It’s your property. You’re paying the bill. And maybe you owned the home for years before hiring a property manager without ever having someone tell you that the dryer vent needed to be cleaned annually or that the irrigation system had to be winterized.
So why does Rent Right require certain maintenance on the Prescott-area rental properties we manage?
The short answer: to help protect the people living in your property and the property itself.
Protect the Resident
Some of our mandatory maintenance requirements are pretty easy to understand.
We rekey properties between Residents so a new Resident doesn’t have to wonder who might still have a key to their home. We require working fire extinguishers and properly functioning smoke and carbon monoxide detectors when applicable. Dryer vents are cleaned and fireplaces are inspected because buildup or improper operation can create a safety concern.
These aren't areas where we think “it’ll probably be fine” is a particularly good management strategy.
Protect the Investment
Your rental property is one of the biggest investments you own. Some of our other requirements are less about immediate safety and more about protecting the systems within that asset.
If you’ve spent a winter in Northern Arizona, you know freezing temperatures and water don't exactly make great roommates.
That’s why, if the property has these systems, irrigation systems are drained and winterized, and evaporative coolers are properly shut down for the winter and started back up in the spring. A relatively small amount of preventive rental property maintenance can help protect these systems and gives us an opportunity to identify problems before they potentially become much larger ones.
The goal isn't to create another maintenance expense. It's to help avoid the much bigger expense that can come from preventable damage.
Mandatory Doesn't Mean "Required by Law"
This is an important distinction.
Arizona law generally requires rental property owners to maintain their properties in a fit and habitable condition and keep supplied systems and facilities in good and safe working order. Rent Right's specific preventive maintenance schedule, however, is our management policy. It establishes the standards we use when caring for Prescott-area rental properties entrusted to us.
If a system, appliance, or amenity is part of the home we're marketing and providing to a Resident, our policy is that it needs to remain functional throughout the residency.
And we don't make every maintenance recommendation mandatory.
Our Maintenance Addendum separates required items from elective maintenance that owners can choose to have us coordinate, including things like annual HVAC servicing, water heater flushing, roof inspections, and garage door servicing. These preventive measures can help extend the life of certain systems, identify problems early, and potentially save owners money in the long run.
There is a difference between “This would be a good idea” and “We need this done in order to responsibly manage the property.”
Preventing the Preventable
No amount of preventive maintenance can guarantee that something won't break. Homes, like people, have a lot of moving parts and pieces. Over time, parts wear down and pieces break.
But after managing rental properties in Prescott and the surrounding communities for more than a decade, we've learned there are certain risks we can reasonably reduce and certain problems we'd much rather catch early.
Property management isn't just collecting rent and calling a vendor after something breaks.
Sometimes good property management means doing a little work today so we hopefully don't have to make a much more expensive phone call tomorrow.
Protect the Resident. Protect the Investment. Prevent what we reasonably can.
That's the idea behind our mandatory maintenance.
