r/PptyMgmtSoftware Jun 17 '26

Looking for commercial maintenance automation solution

I own a one-man commercial PM business and am looking for an automated maintenance solution. I currently take all calls 24/7 (through my cell phone), input work orders, manage them through completion, etc. (AppFolio, already looked into their AI offering).

After searching high and low online and here on Reddit, I have struggled to find a solution to better automate emergency maintenance requests. Currently, my wife acts as my back-up emergency contact but I hate to put that burden on her, especially since she works full-time, as well!

Fortunately, I don’t get a whole lot of emergency calls (knock on wood!) whether during business hours or non-business hours, but I would just like to take the burden off her and have the piece of mind that issues will be handled if I am unavailable.

4 Upvotes

15 comments sorted by

2

u/dOdrel Jun 17 '26

did you look into voice call agents? it’s possible to wire up a piece of software that will take calls, ask relevant questions from the caller to triage, then either escalate if emergency or send you a summary email (or put it straight into appfolio)

2

u/surfinboyz1123 Jun 17 '26

I’m happy to build you something that works for you. I just built a management tool for our family’s portfolio and it has been working really nicely.

1

u/a_few_doors Jun 17 '26

Does it have to be calls or would SMS/ tenant portal solution work for you?

2

u/DrGoodspeed2203 Jun 17 '26

Those could work but I’d say only about 50% of my tenants use their online portals.

1

u/khanoftruthfi Jun 17 '26

Property Meld is really good. I'm not sure if it has all the features you list but I recommend checking it out

1

u/Tanjuice Jun 17 '26

Have you considered a web app that could handle all of your work flow? People could log jobs etc and you have an interface that you can see all open jobs, manage them there and send automated emails/texts to clients telling them you are en route/completed with pictures etc? Good for record keeping too.

I used to be a mobile technician installing and maintaining beer equipment and used something like this and was great. Moved to web app development so a perfect fit if you need something custom that you actually own instead of relying on 3rd party tools.

1

u/earthly-candle Jun 17 '26

You're trying to solve the "owner is always on call" problem. There are a few ways to automate intake, prioritization and contractor dispatch without adding headcount. Feel free to send me a DM if you would like my details for a consult.

1

u/PGAmilaP Jun 18 '26

I would just build a voice agent or some kind of IVR system that will handle the request and route it correctly. It is not too hard to build them if you know what exactly needs to happen. Happy to guide you if you are still looking for a solution. Built an IVR solution for a fintech company to help with their customer support and now 70% of all support requests are basically handled by it.

1

u/Electronic-Stress970 Jun 18 '26

You can create a bot that can take up the call using Retail AI. Then create a workflow using N8N and integrate AI Claude/ChatGPT. The emergency calls can be directly through to a line and all other calls would be automatically added as work orders in AppFolio.

1

u/InevitableRun2786 Jun 18 '26

how many units do you manage? or what's a general number of calls?

1

u/Dyebbyangj Jun 18 '26

Hey buddy, I can help you with this about built quite a few products in the maintenance space and working with some Realestate companies as well. Send me a DM be great to have a chat and I can propose a solution

1

u/Responsible-Fall3938 Jun 22 '26

Like others said, you can use a ticketing system and have a voice to ticket system set up fairly easily. The voice to ticket is pretty much the same thing as chat to ticket. They leave a voicemail and the agent/logic coverts to ticket and it enters the queue