Tenant maintenance requests: a process that protects both sides

Maintenance is where landlord-tenant relationships are won and lost. Not because tenants expect palaces — because they expect to know whether anyone heard them. A good process is mostly a communication process, and it can be described in four moves.

1. Make reporting easy enough to happen early

The expensive version of every fault is the one reported late. If reporting means composing a text to a landlord they don't want to bother, tenants sit on small problems — and small problems compound quietly inside walls and under floors. Whatever channel you use, the test is: can a tenant report a drip in under a minute, with a photo, at 9pm on a Sunday, without feeling like a nuisance?

2. Acknowledge fast, even when you can't fix fast

Most tenant frustration isn't about the timeline — it's about silence. 'Seen it, plumber booked for Thursday' costs ten seconds and buys enormous goodwill. Landlords do have obligations to respond to repairs within a reasonable time, and urgent problems (no hot water, a burst pipe, no heating in winter) set their own pace; the acknowledgement is what proves the clock started.

3. Keep the job and the conversation together

The failure mode of text-message maintenance is that the photo is in one thread, the tradie's quote in an email, and the 'all done?' in a phone call nobody wrote down. Keep everything about a job in one place — the report, the photos, the messages, the outcome. When a job lives on a board both sides can see (open, in progress, done), the status update sends itself.

4. Close it out on the record

Mark the job done where the tenant can see it, with the date and, ideally, the invoice attached to the property's file. That last step is what turns day-to-day maintenance into an asset: a complete, dated history of the property that serves you at tax time, at sale time, and in the rare dispute.

Where Landy fits

Landy is this process, built as a product: photo reports in under a minute, a shared board that shows status without anyone chasing, and every step landing on an append-only property record. The process above works on paper too — it's just harder to keep honest.