Page 34 - NY Cooperator October Expo 2019

34 THE COOPERATOR — OCTOBER 2019 COOPERATOR.COM All of your Building Maintenance Supplies from One Source! Come visit us: Booth #319 Website: www.1SourceSupply.net Email: info@1SourceSupply.net P: 631‐623‐2220 F: 631‐686‐9009 All of your Building Maintenance Supplies from One Source! Come visit us: Booth #319 Website: www.1SourceSupply.net Email:info@1SourceSupply.net P: 631-623-2220 F: 631-686-9009 Ad for Yates Restora on, February 2015 RESTORATION GROUP, LTD. Phone: 718.993.5700 info@yatesrestoration.com www.yatesrestoration.com Yates Restoration has set the standard in the restoration and maintenance of New York CIty’s most notable properties. Our unsurpassed expertise and team of artisans, technicians and project managers, means your project gets done right and on schedule. Call or visit us at our website. Restoring the City of New York for over 90 years • Facade Restoration • Roofing and Waterproofing • Terrace and Plaza Restoration • Balcony Restoration and Repair • Structural Stabilization • Steel Work • Ornamental Sheet Metal • Local Law 11 along and offer to do this for less. One of the challenges in maintaining this portal is the cost. When we figure the cost into our management agreement, we describe the various functions of the portal \\\[to a prospective client\\\], explain how extensive it is, and how it’s only one of the ways we monitor association business. We have another portal that tracks time worked by maintenance staff, for example. But in the end, it comes down to how thorough a manager a given association wants to have.” Whether an association prefers to have an extensive digital catalog of records, or something more old-fashioned, the hard- ships and headaches that can ensue when a board fails to adequately maintain its files are nothing anybody wants to deal with. Properly collecting, storing, and passing along data is imperative to an association’s functionality, and deciding what the best fit is for your particular community is part and parcel of your duty as a board. n Mike Odenthal is a staff writer/reporter for The Cooperator. But their in-house assistants handle a lot of their followup. Our compliance department writes the notices of meetings and the meet- ing agendas and minutes, and make sure in- surance gets updated.” FirstService Residential’s Jordan cites his company's 24/7/365 Customer Care Center service as both a useful time-saving tool and a form of delegation. A homeowner can call the service’s toll-free number and have his or her questions resolved by a cus- tomer care associate. “\\\[The associates\\\] have full access to all the condominium docs, the rules and regulations, and work orders. So you can look up your balance, they can help you make payments, \\\[and\\\] can point you in the right direction. That way, the manager and the board can focus on the bigger proj- ects, and not constantly be having to answer questions about pool hours or trash days.” Crespo says that he has no problem let- ting the people at his company run with the ball. “A lot of people feel that they need to control everything,” he says. “Sometimes the way to make things really work the best is to give up some of that control to some- body else who has the ability to handle it. Being able to do that is what's made us suc- cessful. It's allowed us to really service our properties in a manner that's much more effective.” Property Management Software Along with notebooks and calendars, property managers can employ special software to shave off time from their daily routine and service their clients better. Companies such as Condo Central Cen- ter, Concierge Plus, Yardi, and App Folio, which specialize in property management software, offer general features that include the creation of community websites, give resident access to governing documents, create email and text message blasts, and in- tegrate accounting tasks with resident data. “It just streamlines things,” Brian Bosscher, President of Condo Control Center, says of management software. “It improves com- munication and improves transparency, so that the owners are able to get what they need. They don't have to wait on anybody.” One of the advantages of property man- agement software is its ability to field and route service requests from residents, says Bosscher. “We like to have all of our cus- tomers get all their stuff into our system di- rectly, so owners and residents can put the requests in themselves. That saves manage- ment time. They don't have to type it, they don't have to record it. And then you've got everything in one spot. It makes it easier to follow up on it.” Peter Pietrzkiewicz, Founder of Con- cierge Plus, says that his company's suite of tools helps managers with tasks, as well as accounting for their time. “One of the things that we have in our platform is the tasks module. It allows you to also create the different kinds of things that a property manager is working on in a given month or in a given period, and enables you to up- date those tasks with progress on that item and keep track of how much time has been spent on it. Then you're able to print out those tasks in a really easy to understand format that the property manager can in- clude in the board's monthly report.” A property manager with some degree of computer literacy and training will find that management software is easy to use. “Whether that's sharing files, doing resi- dents' email blasts or text message blasts, keeping track of packages, amenity book- ings, payments,” Pietrzkiewicz says, “all of that stuff is done in a seamless and inte- grated way with any kind of online property management software. We try to put com- plex features and functionality into a very simple and intuitive interface that really lets you get a lot done with not a lot of clicking.” In the end, it all comes down to planning for a manager, while not letting events dic- tate his or her work, says Weil. “One of the hardest things for managers is they want to make owners happy. Like, 'So-and-so said he wanted to see me on Tuesday, but I'm supposed to be across town.' You really have to set expectations as a manager – and then you have to manage the people who are in effect your bosses.” “There's an old saying: 'Failure to plan is a plan for failure,'” says Nardone. “And that couldn't be more true. It is the employees who don't plan who are the ones who strug- gle the most with time management.” n David Chiu is an associate editor at The Co- operator. HOW PROPERTY... continued from page 27 MAINTAINING... continued from page 33