Read how Professionals Narellan + District is using Tapi to streamline property maintenance and enhance the ‘wow’ factor its team is so well-known for.
The real people of real estate
At Professionals Narellan + District, real estate is a family affair.
Steve and Suzanne Diggins head the team as director and office manager, and they’re supported by a powerhouse of women (including their daughter, Tiarne) across sales and property management.
They’ve been in the real estate industry for a long time and lived in their local community of Macarthur for even longer. They know the key to providing exceptional customer service is being people-focused and professional, and it’s that dedication that drives the firm to constantly improve the way it works.
Tiarne Diggins recently joined the team and alongside managing the social media marketing and advertising of client listings, she’s also in charge of tracking rental property maintenance.
Before: staff changes expose room for improvement
When Tiarne came on board, two of three property managers had recently moved on. Property maintenance was something they’d always struggled to keep up with, and with only one remaining property manager, this exacerbated the issue.
The team had previously relied heavily on email and phone calls between landlords, tenants and tradespeople, but “trying to remember what had been done for each individual property was very stressful,” Tiarne says.
There were a lot of follow-ups involved which sometimes left jobs ‘in progress’ for several months.
“A tenant might not answer the phone, the landlord might not respond to your email, the tradesperson might take three months to send you an invoice.
“When you’re dealing with multiple maintenance jobs all at once, that’s time-consuming.”
After: Tapi the king of organisation
Real-time tracking of job progress
When you’re managing hundreds of properties, that’s a lot of landlords and tenants to keep happy.
Tiarne uses Tapi’s Maintenance Tracker every day to make sure “no job gets forgotten or missed”. Once the job has been approved, Tiarne can issue a work order, and it goes straight to a tradesperson for quoting. When she opens a job, she has a full activity log from start to finish, significantly reducing the number of phone calls and emails.
Seeing this type of detail in real-time means landlords can make decisions faster, there’s less disruption for tenants and the team can close jobs quicker.
“With maintenance issues, when it rains, it pours,” Tiarne laughs. “In any given month, we could be dealing with upwards of 15 open jobs, and with Tapi, we’re able to close those jobs much quicker and avoid, where possible, carrying them over into the next month.”
Warranty claims made easy with property history
A follow-on benefit of having streamlined job tracking is the team now has a detailed record of every maintenance job, something they can tap into when dealing with warranty claims.
Previously, this involved digging through email chains and paper files, a process that left too much room for error if record-keeping wasn’t studiously maintained.
With the click of a button, Tiarne can update each job’s progress and, when completed, close the job –confident that all the details have been saved, should they be needed later.
Reminders keep active jobs top of mind
Tiarne says the other great thing about Tapi is its automated reminders, which she has set to trigger at multiple stages through the maintenance process.
“I may only get a chance to look at Tapi once in the morning and once in the afternoon. The automated reminders help me prioritise what jobs need my attention first and stop jobs from falling through the cracks.”
Tapi also helps keep clients and suppliers accountable for their part in getting the job done.
“Tapi is just easy. It shows me where there are bottlenecks – and therefore who I need to contact to get things moving again.”
“Everyone loves the Tenant Concierge”
Tapi isn’t just making things easier for the team at Professionals Narellan + District. It’s making clients happier too.
“We’ve got the Tenant Concierge set up on our website – tenants absolutely love it!”
With the Tenant Concierge, tenants get immediate answers so their maintenance issues can be resolved, triaged or reported right away. Collecting all the information up-front helps avoid unnecessary call-outs and extra costs for landlords.
Move into real estate made breezy
When Tiarne decided to join the family business, she had no prior experience in real estate. She says it was a big learning curve, and one of her first assignments was figuring out how to integrate Tapi.
She found Tapi “very easy to learn” and “it has helped me find my feet quickly” in a fast-paced, ever-changing industry.
“Steve doesn’t always get technology,” Tiarne laughs. “But Tapi has actually helped me learn a lot about the world of maintenance and repairs, and now I feel confident that I have everything I need to do my job well.”
See for yourself how Tapi can help your property management business deliver a world-class experience for tenants and landlords.
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