Camden Cuts Apartment Maintenance Completion Times in Half with Mobile Facilities App

Amidst the flurry of activity at RealWorld 2021, we were able to pin down Camden’s Danielle Rivers for a chat about how moving from paper to a mobile app has transformed the company’s response time and efficiency in taking care of apartment maintenance requests. Her response almost defies belief: “We’ve been able to double the amount of work that’s getting completed,” she glows. Or put another way, Camden’s maintenance techs are getting their work orders done in half the time they did when depending on a paper-based system. And perhaps the most striking fact? It didn’t require an investment in fancy hardware. The RealPage Mobile Facilities app works on a standard cell phone. The pitfalls of paper for maintenance requests “Back when we were using paper service request forms, our techs were losing 15 minutes just going to the office to get what they needed to get jobs started,” Rivers explained. “They had to print the request forms and collect the keys necessary to get into those units. Then they had to walk back to the units to get the work done. Then it was back to the office again to print more request forms and gather more keys, and those forms had to be completed, and the manager had the job of closing out the tickets. And of course, all of these interactions and conversations between techs and the staff in the front office take time and attention away from their core duties.” Part of RealPage’s Property Management Suite, Mobile Facilities is an app that delivers work orders directly to the maintenance techs’ cell phones, so they can methodically knock out their tasks without trips to the office. It lets them update job status as jobs are finished and close out tickets themselves. And they can even create new service requests on the spot as they come across problems that need addressing. All this activity is being recorded and monitored in real time by the maintenance manage...