How to handle commercial maintenance requests

01 / 08

Why maintenance goes wrong at small properties

The failure is rarely the repair. It is the handoff: the request that arrived as a voicemail on a Friday, the vendor who was called but never confirmed, the tenant who heard nothing for four days and called again, angrier. Later, nobody can say whether the $1,240 HVAC invoice was the landlord's cost, a CAM expense, or the tenant's responsibility.

A simple system fixes most of this: one way in, a decision about priority and responsibility on day one, a status the tenant can see, and a cost decision at close.

02 / 08

One front door for requests

Pick one channel and tell every tenant in writing: a request form or portal, or a dedicated maintenance email. Phone calls and texts will still happen; when they do, log them in the same place before acting. Every request should capture the same details.

03 / 08

Triage: priority, then whose responsibility

Ask two questions on every request. First, how urgent is it? Life-safety issues, active leaks, no heat in winter, and anything that closes the business are emergencies; tell tenants to call 911 first for anything life-threatening. Problems that hurt operations but can wait a day or two are urgent. Everything else is routine.

Second, who is responsible under the lease? In many triple-net retail leases the tenant maintains its own premises, often including the HVAC unit serving it, while the landlord handles the roof, structure, parking lot, and common areas. Gross and office leases often put more on the landlord. Read the maintenance and repair clause, and check whether the tenant must use your vendors, get approval, or carry a service contract.

04 / 08

Response targets a small owner can meet

Publish targets you can actually hit, then track against them. Promising four-hour response and missing it is worse than promising one business day and beating it.

05 / 08

Dispatch, approve, and keep the tenant informed

Assign each job to one vendor or person, with the access notes and photos attached so nobody calls the tenant to ask again. For anything above a set amount, say $500 or $1,000, get a written estimate and approve it before work starts. If the tenant is responsible but asks you to arrange the repair, confirm in writing that the cost will be billed back.

Keep the tenant informed at each step: received, scheduled, in progress, done. Short notes are enough. Tenants forgive slow parts and busy vendors; they do not forgive silence.

Keep your own vendor list current, with a backup for each trade. The plumber who answers on a Saturday is worth more than the one who is ten percent cheaper, and the night of a burst pipe is the wrong time to find out who that is.

06 / 08

Worked example: close each job with its cost coded

Closing a request means confirming the work with the tenant and deciding where the cost goes. Take three jobs at a fictional center in one month. A roof leak over Suite 110 costs $2,800 to repair: roof repairs are the landlord's job under that lease, and the CAM clause allows roof repairs (not replacement), so it goes to the CAM pool. A clogged drain in the café's kitchen traced to grease costs $425: the lease makes the tenant responsible for damage it causes, so it is billed back to the tenant. A failed parking-lot light pole fixture costs $310 and is a common-area CAM expense.

Of $3,535 in repairs that month, $3,110 is recoverable through CAM by each tenant's pro-rata share, $425 is a direct tenant chargeback, and the owner absorbs only the CAM share that belongs to any vacant suites. Without the cost decision at close, the whole $3,535 would likely have landed in a general repairs line and stayed with the owner.

07 / 08

Preventive maintenance cuts the request count

Most emergency calls at small properties trace to a handful of systems: rooftop HVAC, roofs and drains, parking-lot lighting, and backflow and fire systems. Schedule them: quarterly HVAC service where you are responsible (and proof of service where the tenant is), a spring and fall roof and drain inspection, a monthly lighting walk, and annual life-safety testing as your jurisdiction requires.

Watch for repeat requests. The third call about the same suite's leak in six months is not three repairs; it is one problem that needs a different fix.

08 / 08

Where TenantPoint fits

TenantPoint's tenant portal lets tenants sign in by emailed link, with no password. Reporting an issue walks them through category, details and priority, access notes, and photos, and tells anyone marking an emergency to call 911 first. The request arrives as a work order, appears on Home and in the alert bell, and is emailed to you right away when email delivery is set up.

From there you assign a vendor from your list, record estimates with owner approval above your threshold, and move the job through statuses from Submitted to Closed; tenants are emailed at key status changes and see notes you mark visible to them. SLA policies by priority, recurring maintenance schedules, and a possible-repeat-issue flag cover the rest, and the outgoing payment can be linked to the work order when you review the bank transaction.

Put it into practice

TenantPoint handles this workflow in Commercial property work order software and Commercial tenant portal software. See all TenantPoint solutions or how it compares with other software.