For a business decision maker, return on investment is key to any decision. As attractive the practicality of the technology, it has to work from a financial perspective. In this post, I’ll outline where you’ll see the payback from investing in a mobile property management strategy.

The Investment

The actual investment in the mobile components of these solutions is actually very small.  Most property management companies already have in place work order software or service management systems that track the preventive maintenance tasks they need.  When you extend an existing system out to the field, particularly with a BYOD strategy where you’re allowing people to use their own phones, the investment is not necessarily a great one. This is especially true if the vendor of the software that you’re using already has mobile modules.

The Return

Even if there were a substantial investment, the return is very easily measured and recouped through three main areas.

1. Working productivity

Working productivity could be getting the same amount of work done with five workers as opposed to seven because now they are moving more efficiently from job to job.  They’re very efficiently communicating about the jobs that they have to work on. They’re not relying on returning to a central location for the next task or more information, and not having to come back at the end of the day with a stack of paperwork to enter updates on what they’ve done into the system.  Productivity is one area where there is very direct and very measurable impact in mobility.

2. Tenant Satisfaction

With a successful mobile strategy, you can publish higher tenant satisfaction numbers.  Two things will happen.  You retain tenants longer and you’ll be able to attract more tenants and fill more vacancies quickly. High quality service delivery demands great mobility, and great mobility requires access to critical data anywhere. Improved productivity means that workers can respond to and resolve incidents faster. When property managers and field personnel have mobile access to applications that allow them to update work order statuses on the spot, you can build extremely accurate response time metrics.

3. Preventive Maintenance

Mobility allows for a very strong handle on your preventive maintenance for building systems and building infrastructure, Maintaining equipment on a very regular and predictable basis extends the equipment’s life cycle, reducing the amount of capital investment that you have to make replacing systems prematurely. With a mobile program, building engineers can see at any time the list of the issues that they need to resolve in the moment.  If they ever find themselves at a point where they have an extra 45 minutes between jobs that they weren’t planning on, they’ll have data in their hands to guide their focus on those kind of preventive maintenance jobs.

When they get to those preventive maintenance jobs, if they’ve got a good mobile application with them, that application will tell them the exact steps that need to be taken.  It will allow them to create new issues to resolve and it may even give them specific instruction through videos or pages in a manual that have been scanned and attached to that task. Improving the maintenance on the building systems drives down the costs of continuing to operate the building.

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Want to learn more? Watch this clip from our recent webinar “Preparing for the Mobile Future” with Mat Brogie, Owner of MobilityCIO and Duke Long, Owner of Duke Long Agency: