Equity Residential’s Centralized Maintenance Helps Its Hiring Challenges

Operational centralization continues to be 2022’s apartment management buzzword. Companies that have long struggled to fill positions, particularly in their maintenance departments, are finding greater efficiencies when performing routine and necessary work such as apartment turns and preventive maintenance.

Equity Residential (EQR) is among them. Its director of operations strategy, Brandon Winter, tells GlobeSt.com that his company is “reimagining how our service teams operate to the benefit of our employees, customers, and shareholders through leveraging technology, centralization, and strategic outsourcing with partners like Lessen.”

Historically, its communities operated with a service manager supported by a team of service technicians and porters to complete nearly all day-to-day service requests, turns, and preventative maintenance work at their one assigned community.

“Teams did not move to support other properties, and we typically only outsourced complex specialty work and projects,” Winter said. “When work piled up, teams worked overtime to get it all done, some would get vended out at higher rates, or work was deprioritized only to be completed at a future date.

“In some cases, this meant that some apartments would take weeks instead of days to turn. Or we would postpone important preventative maintenance projects.

Winter said that today, as Equity Residential pivots to managing its communities with larger teams working across property lines, it is strategically outsourcing certain aspects of the service and maintenance work to Lessen.

“Specifically, the work required to turn apartments is generally predictable and routine and can be completed by trusted and capable contractors,” he said. “By leveraging the tech portal from one of our service partners, Lessen, it allows our teams to proactively schedule and plan, make ready services and receive real time visibility into the status of work.”

Staffing Utilization and Efficiencies

Winter said with centralization and outsourcing, EQR can operate its communities with fewer on-site service employees.

“It’s a challenge to fill open positions with quality service employees these days,” Winter said. “So, [reducing] our need to rely on dedicated on-site service personnel is a ‘win.’ In a recent takeover of a new market, this approach enabled us to work through a backlog of turns from the previous management, allowing us to staff these communities with fewer service employees than traditionally.

“Fixed contracted rates allow our teams to more accurately budget and project turn costs. Shifting the responsibility of the make-ready process to a vendor, allows our onsite teams to focus on the customer experience and asset preservation.

Our onsite teams have the peace of mind knowing that turns are going to be completed on schedule and to our standards even when emergencies or other priorities occur.”

Lessen uses a proprietary tech platform that enables its local field project managers to deploy and manage a network of vetted service professionals in 40+ markets, considerably reducing labor and turn times for clients like Equity. These clients also benefit from its supply chain and nationally negotiated pricing.

System Automatically Communicates Key Work Dates

Winter said that this approach allows EQR to “get the physical work done (i.e. turns) that often gets deprioritized when more urgent tasks arise.

“However, we are optimistic that integrations (currently in process) between our property management system and Lessen’s platform will significantly streamline our turn process by automatically communicating important dates and scope in a timely manner and provide better visibility to work scheduling, status, completion, and acceptance.”

EQR onsite staff perform inspections (i.e. pre-move out walks) and then inform Lessen what is needed, so that a customized scope for each turn can be established.

“We think we’ll be able to use additional metrics and reporting to streamline our turn process and reduce the wait time in between key tasks to reduce our unit down time between residents,” Winter said.

Brad Hamel, executive vice president of operations at Lessen, tells GlobeSt.com that his company’s technology “allows us to deliver service faster because we are modernizing a space that still heavily relies on spreadsheets, phone calls and emails for project management.”