Maintenance

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Residents’ maintenance needs can vary greatly, from changing a hard-to-reach light bulb to fixing an overflowing toilet that’s flooding a bathroom. Some of your residents’ maintenance requests, while important, may not be emergencies. But other residents’ requests may need an immediate response to protect your residents’ health and safety and your property.

One of the most important things you can do before winter settles in at your site is to inspect your roof. That’s because most roof damage occurs during winter. Harsh weather conditions—such as heavy rain or snow, strong winds, and extreme temperatures—can cause substantial damage to a building’s roof, says Kent Mattison, president of a roofing consultant company. But many sites worry about their roofs only after these conditions cause damage, such as leaks. This reactive approach can lead to premature roof failure and costly interior damage.

With the approach of the fall heating season, it’s a good time to consider the steps that need to be taken to get your heating system online for the upcoming cold weather. Increasing oil prices have alerted many owners to the basic fact that an inefficient boiler will waste unnecessary dollars that could be saved with proper maintenance. Such preparation assures the building that the boiler will continue to operate at peak efficiency, translating into meaningful dollar savings.

Reports of water leaking from a bathroom ceiling or other types of water intrusion in a unit are serious complaints that deserve your immediate attention. Sometimes a pipe may break, in which case a household is not at fault. Other times, a resident’s child may have thrown toys down the toilet, causing plumbing problems, or a resident may have forgotten to shut off the tub faucet.

Preventive maintenance is a thankless task. Occurring behind the scenes, preventive maintenance usually doesn’t get noticed unless something disastrous happens. Owners and managers often give landscaping and cleaning services priority because the benefits associated with those activities are readily visible. Roof care and building exterior maintenance, on the other hand, because of their relative high costs and low visibility, are often postponed or simply neglected. But owners and managers ignore preventive maintenance at their own peril.

Most residents are good about reporting maintenance problems. Some owners and managers may say that they’re too good. But there are residents who don’t report maintenance problems. Perhaps these residents are too busy or don’t want members of your maintenance staff in their units. But residents’ failure to report maintenance problems could result in severe damage to your tax credit site and harm to themselves.

With the beginning of spring, now is the optimal time to think about lease-ups and how you may turn over recently vacated units faster. That’s because spring and summer are the times when most sites experience their busiest leasing months. When a resident moves out, you shouldn’t let the process of turning around his empty unit drag on. The faster you turn the unit around, the sooner it will be presentable to new prospects and positive cash flow for the site can be restored.

On February 28, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) issued Notice PIH-2012-17, which contained guidelines on bedbug control and prevention in public housing. This notice included the same guidelines as the ones in HUD Notice 2011-20, issued in August 2011.

Last year, the IRS sent out numerous notices granting certain low-income housing tax credit properties relief from specified Section 42 requirements to provide emergency housing relief needed as a result of devastation caused by some sort of natural disaster.

Last winter many parts of the U.S. experienced record-breaking snowfall. In January, a monster winter storm took aim at a third of the nation. It laid a path of heavy snow and ice from the Rockies to New England, followed by a wave of bitter cold that affected millions of people. Cities including St. Louis, Kansas City, and Milwaukee were hit hard, with midweek snowfalls of up to two feet and drifts piled five to 10 feet high. And even hardy Chicago experienced its third-worst blizzard since record keeping began.