Property Management · Proptech
The work order is the wrong unit of measurement
Counting tickets closed tells you how busy the building was, not whether it is working. A better measure is how often tenants had to tell you something was wrong.
Most commercial property teams measure operations in work orders: how many came in, how fast they closed, how many are open. It’s a reasonable thing to track, and it is almost useless as a measure of whether a building is well run.
A work order is a record that something already went wrong and a tenant noticed and they cared enough to report it. By the time one exists, you’ve lost.
The three failures that never become tickets
Things nobody reported. The flickering light in a stairwell, the meeting room that’s always too warm, the door that sticks. Individually too small to report; collectively the thing that makes a tenant describe a building as badly run.
Things reported outside the system. A word to the concierge, a text to the facilities manager, an aside in a quarterly meeting. These get fixed — and leave no trace, so they never appear in the data and never get addressed at the root.
Things that were fixed too late to matter. The ticket closed inside SLA. The tenant spent eleven days in a cold office first.
Every one of these is invisible in work order reporting, and all three shape renewal conversations far more than your average close time.
A measure that points the right way
Try this instead: what share of issues did you find before a tenant told you?
Call it self-detection rate. It’s a single number, it’s easy to compute if you tag the source of each job, and it inverts the incentive. Closing tickets faster rewards speed after failure. Raising self-detection rewards noticing earlier.
It also reframes sensors and monitoring honestly. The question stops being “do we have building data” and becomes “did the data tell us something before a human did”. A building full of sensors with a self-detection rate near zero is instrumented, not smart.
Reactive, scheduled, and the gap between them
Most teams run two modes: reactive (something broke) and scheduled (the calendar said so). Both are blunt.
Reactive is expensive — emergency callouts, overtime rates, a tenant who has already had a bad day. Scheduled is wasteful in a different way: servicing equipment that didn’t need it while missing the unit that failed three weeks early.
The useful middle is condition-based: act when the equipment’s behaviour changes, not when the date arrives. The signals are often mundane — a pump drawing more current than it did a month ago, a unit cycling more often to hold the same temperature, a door counted far more than usual. None requires sophisticated analysis. They require that someone is looking, and that a change raises a job automatically.
Communication is an operations problem, not a soft one
The most common complaint from tenants isn’t that something broke. It’s not knowing whether anyone was dealing with it.
A tenant who reports a fault and hears nothing assumes it was ignored, even when a technician was on site within the hour. The work got done; the relationship still took the damage. Two or three automatic updates — received, assigned, resolved — cost nothing and change the perception of the same work entirely.
This is worth taking seriously because tenant perception is what renewal decisions are made on, and perception is driven by communication at least as much as by response time.
What to change first
In order of effort against value:
- Tag where every job came from. Tenant report, inspection, sensor, contractor. Without this you can’t measure anything that follows.
- Publish self-detection rate monthly. Alongside close time, not instead of it.
- Automate status updates to the reporter. Three messages, no human in the loop.
- Pick one asset class for condition-based maintenance. Usually HVAC — highest cost, most complaints, clearest signals.
- Ask tenants what they didn’t report. A two-question survey finds the invisible category faster than any system will.
None of this requires replacing your CMMS. It requires measuring the thing you actually care about, which is not how many tickets you closed.
Effinest is a PropTech platform for smart buildings, streamlined operations and proactive tenant engagement. More at effinest.net.
