How to Handle Maintenance Requests as a Landlord

Handling maintenance requests as a landlord sounds simple until you're doing it. A tenant texts that the sink is leaking. You call a plumber, get his availability, relay it to the tenant, hear back a day later that Thursday doesn't work, and start over. A week later you're not sure anyone ever showed up.

The fix isn't working harder at the relaying. It's using the same process for every request, so nothing depends on your memory or your phone. Here's the process, step by step.

Step 1: Give every request one front door

Requests arrive as calls, texts, emails, and hallway conversations, and the ones that come in on the wrong channel are the ones that get lost. Pick one channel and tell tenants to use it. Text works well because tenants already do it, and it needs no app or login.

Whatever the channel, make sure each request captures the same few facts: what's broken, where in the unit, how urgent it feels to the tenant, when someone is home, and whether a contractor may let themselves in if nobody is. That last question saves more back-and-forth than any other, because if the answer is yes, most of the scheduling problem disappears.

Step 2: Decide what's an emergency before it happens

Don't decide in the moment. Write down your list ahead of time: active flooding, a gas smell, no heat in freezing weather, a sparking outlet, a door that won't lock. Everything else is routine and gets scheduled normally.

Emergencies deserve a phone call, not a text that might sit unread, and they deserve a human decision that it really is one. A rule that guesses is a rule that will eventually be wrong, and wrongly labeling a routine job an emergency costs you a premium call-out fee.

Step 3: Schedule once, using real availability

The slow way to schedule is to relay: ask the contractor, tell the tenant, get a "no," ask the contractor again. The fast way is to collect both sides' real availability first, then find the overlap.

Ask the tenant for a few windows. Ask the contractor for a few slots. Pick the earliest time that appears on both lists, and confirm that one specific time with each of them. It's the difference between offering everybody a maybe and locking in a yes. If you're wondering how quickly a given repair should happen in the first place, see how long a landlord has to fix the AC for the general timeline.

Step 4: Confirm the repair is actually fixed

This is the step most landlords skip, and it's where the blame loop starts. The contractor says he went out and the tenant never answered the door. The tenant says nobody came. You're stuck between two confident stories.

A booked appointment is a promise, not a repair. After the scheduled time passes, check with both people, separately:

• The contractor can tell you whether the work was done and, if not, why.
• The tenant can tell you whether the problem is actually gone.

Neither answer alone is proof, so don't let either one close the request by itself. If they agree, close it. If they disagree, that's your cue to follow up, and it's your call, not the software's, how to handle it. And when a reply is vague, like "it's better but still drips a little," treat it as not fixed. A wrongly reopened request costs you a glance. A wrongly closed one leaves a leak nobody is watching.

Step 5: Keep one record per request

For each request, keep a single written record: what was reported and when, who did the work, what they did, what it cost, and how it ended. Dated notes settle "who said what" disputes months later, and they double as your tax documentation, since the same description of the work is what separates a deductible repair from a capital improvement. The free landlord maintenance log template has the columns ready, and this guide to rental maintenance tax deductions explains why they matter.

How Doot handles the whole loop

Doot runs this process over text and phone so you don't have to be the switchboard. Your tenant texts the issue, with no app to install. Doot asks them for their available windows, reaches your contractor by text or phone, matches the two, and asks you to approve the booking before it's locked in.

After the appointment time passes, Doot texts the tenant to ask whether the repair was completed and calls the contractor to ask the same. Neither answer closes the job on its own. Once both are in, you get a notification that states each side's answer, and you decide whether to close the request or flag it for follow-up. Every text, call, and decision is saved on the request's timeline.

If you'd like to try that instead of relaying messages by hand, Doot is free to start.