HVACBossPro Blog — Property Managers & Commercial

Servicing a Rental-Home Portfolio: One Client, Dozens of HVAC Systems

A rental-home portfolio is a strange kind of customer. It is one client, but it is spread across the whole service area, with a different system, a different filter, a different tenant and a different way in at every house. Getting the work done is the easy part. Keeping it organized is where most small shops struggle.

From a Few Rentals to a Portfolio

The early stage of the relationship, with a single owner and a handful of houses, is covered in Landlord HVAC Service: Turning One Rental Owner Into a Steady Account. A portfolio is what that becomes when the owner keeps buying, or when a property manager hands you every single-family rental they run.

At five houses, you can keep it in your head. At twenty-five, you cannot. You need to know, for any address, what system is there, when it was last serviced, what is due, who to call to get in and where the bill goes. And you need to see the whole portfolio at once, so you can plan the work.

Every House Under One Client

In HVACBossPro, the owner or manager is a single client, and every rental home is an address underneath. Each address has its own map pin, equipment record, access notes and job history. Open the client and you see the whole portfolio. Open one address and you see everything about that house.

If the portfolio arrives as a spreadsheet, a CSV import brings the addresses in, and they are placed on the map automatically. That first look at all the pins on the map is often eye-opening: you see right away that eight of the houses are in one neighborhood and three are way out past the county line. The import itself is covered in Importing a Property Manager Address List by CSV for HVAC Service.

Build the Equipment Records House by House

Do not try to fill in thirty equipment records from the owner's memory. Fill them in as your techs visit. On the first visit to each house, the tech records:

• System type: Central AC + Furnace, Heat Pump, AC only, Furnace only, Mini-Split, Boiler or Package Unit.
• Brand, model number and serial number.
• Year installed and tonnage.
• Filter size.
• Unit location: attic, closet, garage, basement, crawlspace or outside.
• Access notes: lockbox, gate code, dog, thermostat location.

Once it is in, it shows under the address on every list and on every tech's phone at every visit after. Within one season of tune-ups, the whole portfolio is documented.

Let the Visits Come Due on Their Own

Most rental portfolios do best on a spring and fall plan: a cooling check before summer and a heating check before winter, with a filter change each time. Set each address to 180 days between visits.

When a visit comes due, it appears on the Waiting List, a live map and list of everything ready to be scheduled. Pins are colored by status: not due yet, due now, and overdue past a 7-day grace. With a portfolio, the map view is the useful one. You can see which rentals in the north end are due and put them on one van on one day, instead of driving across town for each house.

Route the Portfolio by Area

Pull the due rentals onto the dispatch board, assign them to a van and a day, and auto-route Closest First or Furthest First from the shop. You can also set the route order by hand when a tenant can only be home in the afternoon.

Many shops run one van on repair calls and one on maintenance. Portfolio tune-ups fit well on the maintenance van, and they fill in quiet weeks in spring and fall. When a no-cooling call comes in from one of the rentals, it goes to the repair van so the tune-up route keeps moving.

Know What the Owner Will Ask

Portfolio owners and managers ask the same questions over and over. Which houses have the oldest systems? Did the house on Pine get its filter changed? How much did we spend at the Oak Street rental this year? Keep the answers easy to reach:

• Age and type of every system lives on the equipment records.
• Proof of the work lives in the before and after photos on each job.
• Spending by property shows on the monthly statement, where every line is labeled with its address, and in reports by account.

Being able to answer in one text instead of a week of digging is a big part of why owners keep you.

One Bill for the Whole Portfolio

Thirty houses can mean thirty invoices a month in a busy summer. Set the account to Monthly, and the owner or manager gets one statement each month covering every property, with each line labeled with the address. Line items and sales tax carry through, and the card on file can be charged on a schedule. The details are in One Monthly Statement per Account: Billing Property Managers for HVAC Work.

For how portfolios fit with apartment buildings, light commercial and the rest of the commercial side, visit the HVACBossPro commercial HVAC software page.