The best way for California rental property owners to avoid a large and unexpected maintenance bill is through preventative maintenance. Preventative maintenance is a money saver, and more importantly, it preserves the condition and value of your asset.
Implementing a preventative maintenance program at your California City rental property will
attract and retain tenants. It will give you the opportunity to make upgrades and updates when it’s time. You’ll reduce the deterioration that can happen with general wear and tear.
The best part of preventative maintenance is that it reduces the number of emergencies you need to respond to as a landlord. Avoiding major and unexpected repair costs is essential to your ROI and the health of your investment.
Preventative maintenance allows you to catch problems while they’re still small.
As
professional California City property managers, we always recommend that owners make preventative maintenance a priority when renting out a home. This is where we focus on the homes we manage and maintain. Good property managers will understand the importance of preserving the value of your property. They’ll also help you avoid those major repairs that can seriously damage your ROI.
Here’s how preventative maintenance can help, and how it should be implemented at your own rental property.
What Does Preventative Maintenance Include?
Preventive maintenance is defined as a set of inspections, services, or actions that bring about regularly scheduled maintenance at your property in the pursuit of preventing unexpected failures in the future. To state it more clearly, you perform preventative maintenance in order to fix things before they break.
Preventative maintenance can cover minor issues that are quick and easy as well as complicated projects that involve entire systems. Changing an air filter takes about five minutes and costs less than $10. That’s an example of preventative maintenance.
Pest control is another example of preventative maintenance. You want to have your property treated on a regular basis so you don’t attract termites, mice, and other pests.
Look at landscaping: also an important part of preventative maintenance. You need to think about how you’ll handle lawn care and landscaping. The entire exterior of your rental property will need some attention. When will you trim back the bushes and the trees and power wash the siding?
These should go onto your preventative maintenance checklist.
The most important things you’ll want to focus on when putting together a preventative maintenance plan, however, are your major systems. Most repair calls concern air conditioning in the summer, appliance breakdowns, and occasionally leaks, drips, or plumbing issues that occur when we least expect it.
Heating and Cooling Systems: Maintain your HVAC System
One of the most expensive systems in your rental home is your HVAC system, which covers the heating, cooling, and ventilation in your property. You don’t want to replace a furnace or a cooling system until you absolutely have to; those items cost thousands of dollars.
This is how preventative maintenance really provides value. It helps you reduce the risk of surprise repairs and it also extends the lifespan of your heating and cooling unit.
The best thing you can do to protect your HVAC and prolong its life is to contract with a local HVAC technician who can conduct annual inspections and provide ongoing service to keep your system running efficiently and correctly. This will cut down on repair requests and help you optimize the functionality of your most costly units.
A preventative maintenance program like this will save you money and headaches in the long term. You greatly reduce the risk of a tenant calling in the middle of January to report that there’s no heat. You’ll also have peace of mind because well-maintained HVAC systems operate more efficiently. They keep energy bills down and tenants comfortable. That’s good for your retention plans, and good for your bottom line.
Having a relationship in place already with a good HVAC company is also worth the annual visits. This will make a huge difference in response time and cost if an unexpected repair is eventually needed.
Preventative Plumbing Maintenance
Plumbing is rarely an inexpensive repair.
Unless you catch the problem early and respond right away.
Again - preventative maintenance makes that possible. If you’re always looking for water intrusion and potential leaks, you’re not going to miss the one that actually occurs. Water is always a threat to your California City rental property, and you need the plan to detect problems early and address them cost-effectively. Even a minor leak or a drip in a bathroom faucet that’s left alone can quickly become a plumbing disaster. That drip will slowly eat away at floors and walls, leaving you with extra damage to repair and higher costs to cover.
Any time you have the opportunity to
inspect your property, make sure you’re checking under sinks and behind toilets for signs of leaks or standing water.
Caulk toilets and tubs whenever you have the chance. Preventative maintenance should include:
Cleaning out gutters
Making sure there aren’t branches and leaves gathered on the roof
Looking for evidence of water intrusion.
Checking your sprinklers and irrigation systems to ensure they’re not rusting, leaking, or malfunctioning.
The plumbing and maintenance experts we work with also advise us to drain water heaters annually. Water heaters can easily lead to emergency maintenance calls, and it’s easy not to think about them. However, the water heater is an appliance that needs routine inspections and service. Sediment can clog the heater, making them less efficient.
California City Rental Property Appliances
Your appliances are part of your property, and repair requests frequently come in about leaking refrigerators or stoves that stop working. Inspecting the appliances in your rental property is part of preventative maintenance, and it’s best to do this during tenant turnover periods unless a resident calls with a repair need because the dishwasher isn’t working or the washing machine won’t turn on.
Preventative maintenance includes taking safety precautions. For example, if you provide a washer and dryer in your property, you’ll want to be vigilant about preventing fires in the clothes dryer. Nearly 3,000 fires start each year because of dryer lint and poor maintenance. Make sure the lint is cleaned out.
Instead of continually repairing appliances, replace them with newer, more efficient models. You don’t need to keep an oven that’s 30 years old.
California City Tenants as Preventative Maintenance Partners
You need to have a good relationship with your tenants, and one of the reasons that tenant relationship is so important is preventative maintenance. Tenants are important partners when it comes to taking care of your rental property and paying attention.
Let your residents know you expect repair issues to be reported immediately. Deferred and unreported maintenance will only be more expensive and time-consuming.
In our experience, tenants are either super-quick to report every minor issue, or they put it off. They might worry about bothering you, or they may fear that they’ll be blamed (and charged) for maintenance requests they make.
Reinforce that you want to know about repairs right away. Otherwise, you’ll face extra work and higher expenses.
It’s also important that your residents understand what they’re responsible for. The lease should state what maintenance tasks the tenant is responsible for and the cost they will be charged for non-compliance. Maybe you’ll ask them to change the air filters every three or six months. You can provide the filter size in the lease or even provide the filters themselves and then roll the cost into the rent.
Insurance and Good Vendors are Part of Preventative Maintenance
Are you insured?
Are you adequately insured?
Evaluate your insurance policy annually. Preventative maintenance will help you avoid costly breakdowns of systems and appliances, but it can’t help you avoid the covered losses that insurance protects against. Unpredictable things can always occur, and you want to be covered. Your
home value has likely shot up in the last year or two. Make sure you have enough insurance to cover the full value of your investment.
Think about requiring renter’s insurance as well. Instead of relying completely on your own insurance policy, require the tenant to provide evidence of either liability insurance or renter’s insurance which includes liability and insurance for the tenant’s personal possessions.
Vendors are equally as important. Create a list of licensed and insured vendors and contractors who are committed to caring for your
investment property. If there’s an emergency in the middle of the night, you don’t want to be looking for a plumber. You want to have someone reliable and responsive who will answer your call.
Develop relationships with professionals before you need them, and listen to their advice and recommendations when it comes to caring for your property. Make sure all of the vendors you work with are licensed and insured to prevent risk and liability.
