Maintenance Requests: What’s Urgent and What Can Wait

It’s 9:40 on a Tuesday night, your phone lights up, and the toilet in your rental is leaking. Do you get in the car, or do you go to sleep and call your plumber in the morning? Emergency maintenance requests are the one call almost every landlord gets wrong at least once, in both directions.

Kevin and I are walking you through the three-tier system we use to sort what gets fixed tonight from what can wait until Thursday. You’ll get our real lists for all three tiers, including one tier item that isn’t dangerous at all but still gets us out the door.

We also get into the part most landlords miss: the item never sets the tier. The context does. Same broken toilet, different household, different answer. Plus, why it is important to understand your state and local law on habitability violations.

And because we don’t just talk about theory, we’re telling you about the neighbor’s call that ended with an evacuated building, the tenant whose bidet project left him without a toilet, and the vacant house that turned a broken supply line into an expensive lesson.

Hit play. By the end, you’ll have a framework you can hand your tenants before the phone ever rings.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

•  The two-part test we run before deciding anything is a true emergency

•  Our tier one list, plus the item that isn’t dangerous but gets a fast response

•  Why context, not the item, sets your response time

•  The middle move between driving over now and making them wait days

•  Why tier three still gets a same-day reply

•  The four things we set up at move-in so after-hours calls go well

•  A QR code trick that cut our repair calls more than anything else

Episodes & Resources Mentioned

Episode 8: Our Best Tips for a Smooth Tenant Move-In 

Episode 123: Landlord Systems: The Unit Binder 

Episode 131: Landlord vs. Tenant Maintenance 

TurboTenant: Great landlord management software for newer landlords

Innago: Completely FREE landlord management software 

RentRedi: Management software that syncs with QuickBooks Online 

DoorLoop: The best landlord management software for larger portfolios 

California Civil Code 1941.1 (habitability standards) 

California Civil Code 1942 (repair and deduct)  

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🤳Text Us: 650-489-4447

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Transcript

Introduction — Emergency Maintenance Requests, Urgent or Not?

Stacie 0:00

It's 9:40 on a Tuesday night and your phone lights up. The toilet is leaking in your rental property. So do you get in the car, or do you go to sleep and you call your plumber in the morning? Now, if you ignore it, you could have a major water damage issue. If you act on it urgently, you might be teaching your tenant that every drip is a 911. And you guys, we've been on both ends of that call. You know, the actual toilet leak that was resolved with a bucket to be used overnight, and the one that involved a carbon monoxide alarm and an evacuated building. So today, we're handing you a three-tier system that we use to decide on how emergent a maintenance request is, so you never have to guess at bedtime again.

Speaker 0:58

Welcome to Your Landlord Resource Podcast. Many moons ago, when I started as a landlord, I was as green as it gets. I may have had my real estate license, but I lacked confidence and the hands-on experience needed when it came to dealing with tenants, leases, maintenance, and bookkeeping. After many failed attempts, fast-forward to today, Kevin and I have doubled our doors and created an organized, professionally operated rental property business. Want to go from overwhelmed to confident? If you're an ambitious landlord or maybe one in the making, join us as we provide strategies and teach actionable steps to help you reach your goals and the lifestyle you desire, all while building a streamlined and profitable rental property business. This is Your Landlord Resource Podcast.

Stacie 1:47

Hey, landlords. Welcome back to the Your Landlord Resource Podcast. I'm your host Stacie, and I'm here with my cohost, who is also the man who I cohabitate with, Kevin Kilroy.

Kevin 2:02

So now we're cohabitants, huh?

Stacie 2:05

Oh, did I hit a nerve, Kev? Cause I'm kinda running out of ways to introduce you.

Kevin 2:11

I'm good with the stud you live and own businesses with.

Stacie 2:15

Stud, wow. That's an interesting description. Nothing like telling me that you're old without actually telling me your age. All right, moving on. Today, we are discussing one of the most questioned issues in rental property self-management. When a tenant calls or reports a maintenance issue, what is actually an emergency and what is just a standard repair call? And here's why I wanted to do this one. Every landlord we talk to has some story about a late night or an early morning call that has turned out to be not a big deal. And almost all of them have also had a story about the call that they should have taken seriously and did not. And both come from the same root problem. Nobody ever defines the terms, not for the tenant, and honestly, not for themselves either. So today, we are giving you a three-tier framework. Tier one is drop everything and go. Tier two is twenty-four to forty-eight hours. Tier three is gonna be, "Hey, we'll get to it sometime this week," and that's perfectly fine. We will walk through what lands in each bucket, share some personal stories, and then talk about how you get all this in front of your tenants before the phone even ever rings.

Kevin 3:45

So

Why Getting This Wrong Costs You Both Ways

Kevin 3:46

I wanna start with why all this matters. Because a lot of newer landlords treat this as a customer service question, and it's not. It's a risk question and it cuts both ways. Direction one is you underreact. Something genuinely urgent gets logged as a, "I'll get to that," and the damage compounds. A supply line under a sink is a $15 part. That same line left running overnight is a subfloor, drywall, baseboards, cabinets, and possibly the unit underneath. Water damage escalates by the hour, not by the day. And the other cost of underreacting is legal. Most states have some version of an implied warranty of habitability, meaning the unit has to be fit to live in. Here in California, where our sixplex is located, Civil Code 1941.1 spells out what has to be functional. We're talking heat, plumbing, hot and cold running water, electrical, weather protection. Now, Civil Code 1942 then presumes 30 days is a reasonable time to make a repair. And people misquote that number constantly. It's a ceiling for routine items, not a target. And the statute itself says it does not stop a tenant from acting sooner when circumstances require it. I mean, a gas leak doesn't get 30 days, right? As always, we recommend you check your own state and city to see where the law stands because these rules vary enormously by area. Now, direction two is you overreact. You treat every request like a fire drill. So now you are paying after-hours rates on a running toilet. You're burning out your maintenance person. And here's the sneaky part. You have now trained your tenant that there is no difference between a dripping faucet and a sparking outlet. So the day something hazardous does really happen, their call to you sounds like all the others, and they want it fixed now.

Stacie 6:09

Yeah. I mean, it's, it's kind of like the boy who called wolf situation, right?

Tier One — The True Emergencies

Stacie 6:15

So let me define tier one. An emergency is anything that threatens life, health, safety, or the structure itself and gets meaningfully worse with every hour that you wait. If both halves of that sentence are true, you move now, regardless of what time the clock says. So here's our list of the items or things that we consider an emergency and we need to act on quickly. Fire, the smell of gas, carbon monoxide alarm going off with any evidence behind it. For those three, our instruction is not to call us. We instruct the tenants that they need to call 911, get out, and then call us. 'Cause we're a two-hour drive from the Sacramento building, and Jim, our contractor, who is our right hand, he's 20 minutes away. But the fire department is four minutes away. All right, next, active flooding, things like a burst pipe, a broken supply line under a toilet or a sink, or a water heater that has let go, and also sewage backing up into a living space. Electrical, meaning sparking outlets, scorch marks or exposed wires, or a breaker that keeps tripping and is warm to the touch. No heat when it's genuinely cold outside. And you guys, that one moves up fast if the tenant is elderly, medically fragile, or there's an infant in the unit. And last, if the unit can't be secured. So if a door will not lock or a window will not close, or there's a broken lock after a break-in. And I will add one more that is not dangerous, but that we treat as immediate anyway, and that's tenant lockouts. If we have to go and give a tenant access, we charge a fee that is disclosed in our lease, so it's never a surprise. Now, it's not a habitability issue, but it is a human being standing outside their home issue, and I would rather bring a key than have somebody break our window.

Kevin 8:33

Yeah. We have a friend who's a landlord. He owns like 60 doors, so he's not new or inexperienced in the least. One time we're all together and he's telling us he was tired because at 2:00 AM he had gotten a call from a tenant who had been robbed, and somehow in the process of the tenant handing over their wallet to this bad guy, they dropped their keys and later found they couldn't get into their unit. Now, of course, they didn't feel safe going back to the area where they had just been robbed, so they called our friend asking if he could open the door for them. And listen, he's a really nice guy because he got out of bed and drove over there to unlock their front door and let them into the unit.

Stacie 9:17

Yeah. I have my phone on silent, so I would not have heard that call coming in if it was coming to me.

Kevin 9:24

Well, in Sacramento we have smart locks now. So for us, we just pop on the app and hit the unlock and we're all good. But if this was in the middle of the night, there would absolutely be a fee charged for waking us up to do that.

Stacie 9:40

Yeah. And one more thing. Here is something almost nobody sets up in advance. Teach your tenants how to turn the water to the sinks and the toilets off and where the building water shut-off is. Every tenant of ours gets shown how to do this and where the water shut-off for the building is when they move in. More importantly, in our unit binder, we have a short video showing them where it is and how to turn it off. 90 seconds of instruction can save us thousands, because the fastest responder to a burst pipe is not gonna be you, it's gonna be the person already standing in the room watching that water blow out of the wall.

Kevin 10:23

Yeah. I mean, we wish someone was there in the vacant Chico house when the water supply line to the toilet broke and flooded the place for days on end. That was a what? $25,000 insurance claim and months of work. Okay, moving on.

Tier Two & Tier Three Explained

Kevin 10:41

Tier two is the 24 to 48-hour bucket. These disrupt living in the home or get more expensive if they just sit, but nobody is in danger right at that moment. So our list looks like this. Refrigerator or stove not working, and the fridge especially because that is a food loss conversation waiting to happen. Any of the mechanicals, so we're talking heater, air conditioning, water heater.- No hot water is a habitability issue in a lot of jurisdictions, so check whether your state calls it an outright emergency. A broken window or window lock, which is both a security and a weather issue. The garbage disposal when it's not working, and also clogged toilets, sinks, or showers. But listen to the nuance because this is the whole point of this episode. If we're talking a two-bathroom unit and one toilet still works, that's a next day call. Only toilet in the home, we're moving a lot faster. Same with the air conditioning. If it's 108 degrees in Sacramento in August that is not two-tier anymore, that is tier one, especially with an infant or an elderly tenant in the unit. The item does not determine the tier. The context determines the tier. Same broken part, different household, different answer.

Stacie 12:18

Yeah, and we actually just dealt with a broken air conditioner, and yes, it was during hot weather, but it was not over 100 degrees. And luckily for us, this tenant grew up in the South with no air conditioning and was fine sticking it out for a couple of days. Because of course, when the AC goes out in hot weather, our HVAC guy was swamped and there was no way he was getting there within 24 hours. And as it turned out, there was a very expensive part that had to be ordered and it was well over a week before it was repaired. Again, we were lucky that our tenant was patient. And like Kevin said, if there was someone elderly in there, we might have had to go buy a window AC unit or maybe even put them up at a hotel until the AC was fixed.

Kevin 13:05

Yeah. And you know the crappy thing about that whole situation was that literally two weeks before it happened, we had the HVAC guy out there to inspect all of the air conditioners and this was an issue that was not able to be seen and corrected in advance. But because we have a good relationship with him and he knows our units well, he got on it as soon as he could. And he was as shocked as we were that the part wasn't in stock.

Stacie 13:34

Yeah, and he also was shocked that the cost was three times as much as he had thought too. But it was much less expensive to repair it than it was to replace the whole system, so there's that.

Kevin 13:47

Listen, we did all we could to make sure the ACs for the building were running well. But they're 20 years old now, so things are gonna start to happen. All right, let's move on to tier three. The timeline for this is two to four business days, scheduled during normal hours at normal rates. And this would be things like a leaking faucet. And I mean a drip, not a stream. A running toilet, issues with the washer, dryer, dishwasher, or microwave. Also things like broken blinds or a sticky interior door or maybe a closet door off the track that they can't get back on. You know, anything cosmetic. Now, there are two cautions on tier three. First, it doesn't mean you ignore it. Broken blinds are cheap and fast, and the landlord who never fixes the small stuff like that is the landlord whose really good tenant quietly starts browsing rental listings in month 10. One turnover costs dramatically more than a set of blinds, you guys. Second, tier three still gets the same-day acknowledgement, not a same-day repair and acknowledgement. You know, something like, "Got it. That is scheduled for Thursday. Jim will text you when he's on his way." Almost every escalation we've seen between a landlord and a tenant was not caused by the repair timeline, it was caused by the silence around it.

Stacie 15:22

Yeah, exactly. It

The Bidet, The Bucket & The Middle Move

Stacie 15:25

takes just a few minutes to let that tenant feel seen and heard and that you're working on resolving the issue. So let me give you a real example of that middle ground. We had a tenant install a bidet attachment on his toilet.

Kevin 15:42

Now, let me jump in here and say that in our lease, it clearly says no alterations to the unit. So he was already in violation by installing the bidet accessory. I'm sorry, go on.

Stacie 15:53

Right. And I will discuss how we handled that violation as well. So anyway, we're not anti-bidet. The problem was that he threaded a plastic connector onto a metal fitting, which does not work. The tank started leaking at the base and would not hold water. So because we had shown him how to turn the water off in an event like this, he shut the water off and he called us. Now, this is a one-bathroom unit. It was the only toilet in his place. By the book, that's tier two, not tier one. Nobody's in danger, the water's off, nothing is actively getting damaged. But it is their only toilet, so we're also not saying, "See you Thursday." What we did was coach him through a workaround over the phone. So we told him to keep the tank empty, keep a bucket or a pitcher in the bathroom, and fill the tank manually when he needed to flush. Now, it certainly was not glamorous, but it worked, and as a bonus, it stopped the tank from running constantly. Jim got out there the next morning, got the broken piece repaired. Total time of inconvenience was about fifteen hours. The reason I tell that one is the workaround itself. There is a middle move between I am driving over right now and please wait four days. And it's the phone call where you help them limp it along. A bucket under a slow drip or manually filling that toilet tank, a space heater in one of their rooms, or a cooler with ice for their dead refrigerator. That call costs 10 minutes and buys you a night of sleep and a tenant who feels like they're taken care of.

Four Things to Set Up Before the Phone Rings

Stacie 17:46

So how do you install all of this before you need it? You need to do four things. One, you need to put your definitions in writing. Not the sentence, "Call us for emergencies." You need to define those emergencies. Make it an actual list with an estimated response time for each tier. Now, ours lives in the lease and again in our unit binder because nobody reads their lease twice. Two, give them the after-hours path to take. List one phone number and be explicit that fire, gas, and carbon monoxide go to 911 first. Three, put routine requests into a system instead of your text messages so that everything is time-stamped. Now, I do understand that texts are time-stamped, but it is very difficult to show those time stamps if you have to screenshot those texts. When there's a disagreement six months later about when you were told, "I think it was around the 4th of July" is not a defense. A time stamp is. And for this, if you use landlord management software like TurboTenant, Rent Redi, Innago, or most any of them out there, most of those software include a portal for your tenants to send a message or a maintenance request through. In turn, that system will send you a text and an email letting you know when the tenant has reached out. And four, this is the one everyone skips, teach your tenants how to shut the water off when they move in. That's how to turn it off under the sinks and the toilets, the washing machine, the water heater, behind the fridge if you have an ice maker, all the places. If your rental has a special location for turning off the water to the whole building, they need to know that too. If they need a special water valve key, which many places do, have one on property and note where that is in your lease and in your unit binder. And use

Building QR Codes & How-To Videos for Tenants

Stacie 20:02

your smartphone to create a video on how to do this so if they forget, you can send it to them to watch and handle the situation quickly. So the water, the electrical panel, and the gas, if it applies. On your move-in walkthrough, physically point to them. If not doing an in-person walkthrough, have photos and detailed descriptions of the locations, plus links to the videos in your unit binder. And we've talked about this before, but I'll quickly go over it again. Use your smartphone to create a video. If you have a YouTube account, go onto your account and upload that video and mark it as unlisted, then hit publish. Copy the link for that video, go onto your computer, and go to a QR code creator. Pick any company, as long as it's free. Paste the link for your video into that QR code generator software and create an image. You don't need to make it fancy with your logo and all that stuff. Just download that image to your computer and save it in your rental property files. Something like a file named Property Videos or something like that. Then when you're building your unit binder and creating instructions for everything your tenant needs to know, write about what to do if there is a severe water leak and to watch the YouTube video that you've just created. Then attach that image of the QR code in that document. Now, I know for some of you that are not super handy on the computer, that sounds really hard, and I will tell you it takes a little time to learn how to navigate it all. But I am telling you it is 100% worth it. Our most-watched video is the one we made about the garbage disposal and how to clear or reset it if it's not working. You guys, tenants wanna be self-sufficient. They don't want to be calling you for little stuff that they can handle by themselves. Give them the chance to do that.

Kevin 22:07

You know, I still remember the old school mindset that if you call the landlord too much to fix things, your rent will go up.

Stacie 22:14

Yeah. Well, our mindset is we wanna know when things aren't right.

Kevin 22:17

Exactly. Okay, you guys,

The Night of the Carbon Monoxide Alarm

Kevin 22:21

I know we've told this story before, but I want to close with what happened one time at our Sacramento building, because it is why we take alarms as seriously as we do. We got a call from one of our tenants, and it wasn't the tenant with the problem, it was the neighbor. Her neighbor's carbon monoxide detector had been going off, and it's one of those models that talks instead of chirping, so she could hear it through the wall. Now, as we've said before, we're about two hours away, so we ran three calls all at once. Our maintenance guy, Jim, PG&E, which is the gas company, and the tenant to that unit to find out whether he was home. Now, that third call was the one I was holding my breath on, and thankfully, he was out of town. PG&E came and evacuated the building and shut off the gas. Jim had let them in. What they found was a stove burner that had just gotten bumped a little. The knob turned just far enough to release gas without lighting, and that was it. That was the whole cause. Here's what we take from that report. First, the neighbor did not have to make that call. She could have just assumed it was a low battery or something and gone back to what she was doing. That is why we now tell every tenant in writing, "If you hear an alarm that is not yours, please tell us." Second, the talking detector probably made the difference because a chirp just gets ignored, and a voice saying, "Carbon monoxide," does not. Third, if you're two hours away from your property, your response plan cannot be you. It has to be a licensed local person, a utility number, and 911. And your tenants need to know which to call for what.

Stacie 24:18

Yeah. I will admit that when that call came through, I did initially think it was just the battery, but I sure am glad that we followed up on it.

Recap & Final Tips

Stacie 24:28

So if you guys take one thing out of today, make it this: the item does not set the tier, the context does. Life, health, safety, structure, and does it get worse by the hour? That's your test. So that's our show for the day. We really appreciate you hanging out with us. If you enjoyed this episode, would you please do us a favor and leave us a kind review of the podcast? 'Cause reviews really help others find out that we're here and if we're worth giving a listen to or not. If you wanna hear more, follow or subscribe to the podcast so that each week the episodes are downloaded right to your favorite podcast platform. We'd love to stay in contact with you. In the show notes, you can find links to all the free downloads that we offer, ways to sign up for our newsletter, and the wait list for our upcoming course on tenant screening. There's also links to our Facebook group that is just for landlords, and we do share on Instagram and Facebook as well as YouTube, so go check those out. I think that's about it. And until next time, you've got this landlords.