A facilities manager wears many hats and manages many different moving parts. Keeping a property in good condition involves more than just dealing with tenants. It also involves managing equipment, buildings, and budgets.
Facility management requires a manager who can be proactive as well as reactive. And because all of these obligations ultimately rest on the shoulders of one person, it requires choosing and using the right tools for the job.
Let’s take a look at the following facility management checklist to get a better sense of the duties involved as well as some tools that can help make the life of a facilities manager easier.
Finding and retaining tenants
Regardless of whether you’re managing a commercial or residential property, you don’t want vacancies. Vacant units don’t bring in any income, yet they still incur upkeep and maintenance costs, so occupancy is a top priority. Fortunately, you can do many things to attract new tenants as well as retain your best tenants.
Expedite the leasing process
Make it as easy as possible for prospective tenants to apply for and obtain a lease. Simplifying and expediting your leasing process will keep a good prospective tenant from going to other properties that may have a lengthier approval process. Using a customizable and automated web form is a great way to acquire information from prospective tenants quickly.
Screen tenants
Though you want to make the leasing process as efficient as possible, it’s important to avoid rushing through tenant screening. With Jotform’s tenant reference verification form, you can efficiently gather information from a tenant’s references. This helps you make an informed decision when screening lease applicants.
Offer amenities
Tenants love amenities. Anything that can enhance their experience outside of the unit they rent is a definite plus.
Some amenities are familiar to everyone — pools, gyms, athletic facilities, etc. But even providing access to an extra building with some space that tenants can reserve can be a valuable perk.
Create a system for your tenants to request and reserve that space for occasions such as weddings and parties. Also create a document that contains pertinent information for those reserving the space, including contact information for caterers and deejays.
Get feedback from your tenants
Don’t let the only feedback you get from your tenants happen when something breaks. Periodically send your tenants a survey so they can provide you with information on how satisfied they are with your facility, how they rate the responsiveness of your maintenance staff, and how useful they feel the amenities are.
Jotform has dozens of customizable survey templates that can help you gather and organize this information.
Building maintenance
You have to take care of more than just the tenants. Facilities can be as temperamental as human beings, if not more so. Tenants often get antsy when something with the property isn’t working properly — a water heater, HVAC unit, or any of the other moving parts that tenants of an apartment or office space generally take for granted.
Use facility management software
A good facility management software package can seem like a large cash outlay, but it can also save you countless headaches and thousands of dollars over the long term. Facility management software reduces downtime and extends equipment life.
Automate the scheduling of preventive maintenance on electrical, plumbing, HVAC, and sprinkler systems, as well as fire alarms, fire extinguishers, and other equipment to keep it in good working order. Automation also helps you by keeping an updated maintenance checklist and sending real-time notifications to alert maintenance teams and vendors about tasks like cleaning, landscaping, and janitorial services.
Make ad hoc maintenance requests easy
Even with the best preventive maintenance, things sometimes go wrong. Facility management software can help you stay prepared. When the unforeseen happens, give your tenants an easy way to let you know there’s an issue that you or your team members need to address.
An automated web form like Jotform’s maintenance request template delivers the correct information to the appropriate technicians, empowering them to take corrective action. Tenants can include photos with their requests so that you can resolve the problem as efficiently as possible.
When a tenant leaves
Nobody likes to see a good tenant leave, but it happens for many reasons. A job relocation or family tragedy could require a tenant to move out at the end of their lease or even terminate a lease early.
It may seem counterintuitive, but making it easy for tenants to submit lease termination information can work to the advantage of the landlord. The sooner you have information about a tenant’s plans to leave, the sooner you can start looking for a new tenant to occupy that unit. Using a web form to help a tenant create a lease termination letter is an effective way to formally document the process of vacating the property, which then helps the manager get the ball rolling on finding a new occupant.
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