Finding work orders that quietly stopped moving
Property Meld calls a work order a Meld, and a vendor either accepts it or rejects it out of a queue of incoming requests. The damaging case is neither. It sits accepted and unscheduled. It gets scheduled once against a resident who then stops replying. It waits on a part behind a follow up date that has passed. Speed to assign gets watched because it is easy to measure, and the stall after assignment is where the angry call from the owner comes from. Finding it means asking what has not moved since somebody last touched it.
The management system is authoritative for money and knows nothing about the phone call where the owner approved the repair.
A management company runs two ledgers that must never mix: the money it holds for owners and tenants, and its own. Everything downstream of that separation is regulated, which shapes what automation is allowed to touch.
- Property Meld
- AppFolio
- Twilio
When this is the wrong thing to build
Pick something else if your vendors work off text messages and never open a portal. Detecting a stall needs a timestamp on the last real movement, and where the movement happens in a phone the office cannot see, the alert fires on every open job and gets ignored within a fortnight.
The constraint that shapes it
In most states property management is licensed brokerage activity, which means the company operates under a broker and its handling of client funds is supervised, with segregation from operating money and periodic reconciliation expected. More on how this sector works.
No alarm goes off when a thing simply stops arriving. Read what this shape is, or start from one of these.
- Noticing that an agent licence has quietly lapsed
- Watching an MLS feed for the day it goes quiet
- Catching a lapse date nobody put on a calendar
- Closing the registration window before it closes you
- Scheduling the visits a membership already promised
- Closing the permit that never got its final inspection
- How do I find work orders with no vendor activity?
- Why do maintenance jobs sit accepted but never scheduled?
- Can I get alerted when a vendor never responds to a dispatch?
- How long should a work order stay open before escalation?
- What happens when a tenant stops replying to scheduling messages?
Back to property management, or see how this is priced and scoped.