Check that electrical connection Sparky

As promised, in this week's blog post I thought I would summarize the content of the session my property managers and I attended on the need for electrical preventive maintenance.  We have already been practicing PM for our electrical systems, mainly thermography of our electrical panels.  We thought we had it nailed.  Get a thermographer onsite every couple of years, and make the fixes they recommend.

Well, according to the presenter of this session at the expo, that plan was not good enough. Resistance testing, visual inspection of connections are also an important part of electrical preventive maintenance.  And to be the most effective, it should be done every year.

And then every 3 years, there should be "de-energized" maintenance.  Yes, that means turning the power off to the whole building, and checking it all out.

I guess we will be re-considering our electrical maintenance program.  
 

Reporting in on the North Texas Facilities Expo

Wednesday October 5 our Property Managers attended the North Texas Facilities Expo.  It is a difficult proposition to work "on" the business, not just "in" the business.  But we took a day, and went to see what was new and different for property managers.  And the day was a success.  It helps that it was FREE.  We attended a session on electrical preventive maintenance and another one on maintaining fire/life systems.  We also spent time on the exhibit floor meeting vendors.  As we made our way around the exhibit hall, we were surprised how many vendors we already knew, but we also made a number of new contacts for vendors we might want to use.  We definitely got a few ideas.

One idea - door mats - I know, who cares about a door mat.  The vendor mentioned that one application for their mat is to put  "This suite available" on the mat, with the leasing agent's number. Used for retail suites.

Another - roof drain covers - equally exciting, I know.  The thing is, roof drains get clogged and damage is done.  Enough said?  These covers are virtually indestructible and keep out the smallest of particulates to keep the drain clear.

Roofs - Two of the roof vendors we talked to use drones...yes drones...to inspect roofs.  We're definitely bringing these guys in to our PM Huddle to make a presentation.

I'll talk about the sessions we attended next week...

Property Management...It's not like Baseball

Forgive me but I can't help but blog about baseball this week.  We're in the middle of the playoffs and the world series is just around the corner.  Comparing what I do to what others do is a "brain pastime" for me, whereas baseball is "America's pastime."

To me the most striking difference is in the stats.  There's an expression in baseball "batting a thousand." No baseball player has ever done it.  If a player's batting average is anywhere near a third of that, or .333, they are celebrated as hugely successful.  I imagine a scenario where only a third of the time we property managers get the toilet fixed, a tenant's temperature adjusted, or the trash picked up.  It's not a pleasant thought to imagine failing 2/3's of the time, but one I find interesting nevertheless.

It's all about the skills.  Put me in a major league baseball game with a bat in my hand and it's more likely I'd be running away from a pitch coming at me at almost 100 miles per hour, not trying to knock it out of the ball park.  Put a baseball player in my shoes, and maybe he could get the basics of the trash pickup done about as well as I could.  But could even an MLB player find a creative solution to a tough problem at a property, and do it for every single problem, not a third of them?  There's a good reason why properties with professional property management command considerably higher prices than those without.

It's fun to watch baseball, and I get that the two professions can't really be compared.  I do think, however, that because the property management professional solves problems all day every day, they could be considered the "sluggers" of the real estate business.

Is The Ball In Your Court?

I had lunch a few weeks ago with an important mentor from my early days in the property management business.  William A. (Bill) Lawley, CPM, had so many influences on my life that I decided to blog about him.  Bill was President of Swearingen Management Company in those days (80's, yes it was a long time ago), I was his fairthful servant in all things property management. 

When we had lunch, I mentioned to him that I use some of my "Lawley-isms" ALL the time.  There were a few in my memory ready to be tossed off at a moment's notice, which I did right then and there. We both got a good laugh, but actually, I was very serious.  Maybe it was the repetition, I’m just now recognizing!  It does seem now that Lawley had to say things to me over and over.  Like when I would ask him how I should respond to a particular tenant request, he would say to me:  "What does the lease say?"  He said that to me, umm, multiple times before I finally started checking the lease BEFORE I asked him, and often once I checked the lease, guess what?  I found I didn’t have to ask him, which I realized much later was his whole point.  Now I find myself turning the question around with others just like he did with me.

Often I would tell Lawley something that I was 100% confident about.  His response to me was usually "OK, now what is the other side of this story? "Uh, what other side of the story? I would say.  I just told you...don't you believe me?  "Sure I believe you, he would say"  but I also know that there are at least two sides to every story, and I want to hear it.  Over time I slowly began to see the world less in black & white, and more in the grays that are inherent in our lives.   I now realize he had to say this to me a number of times also.  Geez.

There are so more, but a blog post has to end at some point.  I'll close with his admonition to me to "Get the ball out of your court as quickly as possible."  Talk about words to live by.  It's a Lawley-ism for the ages.

Where does your carpet go to die?

No, it's really not a slow blog day.  I just skimmed an article in the trade publication Building Operating Management about this.  Consider a statistic quoted by the article:  "Recycling one ton (2,000 lbs) of VCT (vinyl tile) saves 2,670 gallons of water, the equivalent of 70 kiddie pools."  This is from Armstrong Commercial Flooring, not exactly your typical tree hugger.

As Property Managers, we make sure the tile gets installed correctly.  When it's time to replace, where it goes, nobody knows...right?  A few years ago I had a conversation with a colleague who was involved in the early stages of carpet recycling, it sounded like a good idea, but at what cost of effort, energy, and yes, dollars, to make that happen? 

As this article outlines though, the effort to recycle or re-use flooring materials is starting to go mainstream.  There was even a "third party" re-use company mentioned that I googled, and it seems to be legit - a representative from http://www.repurposedmaterialsinc.com was quoted in the article. Apparently this company takes in materials and either re-use them as they are, or for a different use. An example cited was a basketball court - once it's sanded three times, it can no longer be used for a basketball court, but it could easily be used in a restaurant or other retail store.

As I have mentioned before, our company buys carpet and vinyl flooring in bulk from the manufacturer (used to be Patcraft, now is Mohawk).  Maybe recycling the old carpet is not such a big leap after all.

 

JPM Article: Project What You Expect - Will Do!

There's no sugar coating it, this is budget season.  Everyone I know in Property Management is knee deep thinking about 2017.  I read the Journal of Property Management, and a recent article about budgeting, Project What You Expect caught my attention.  The main take away for me, reflecting my own bias, is that a budget is a "living, breathing document."  Back in the day, it was common practice to spend September and October reading our crystal balls and sending tomes of paper purporting to declare to our clients rosy leasing projections and reasonable operating expenses, resulting in copious cash flow.  Then we would explain variances throughout the year.  A valuable lesson I learned goes something like "Keep It Real."

Now that I'm in a position to organize the budget process, I am applying that valuable lesson.  Our budget format is a constantly updated excel document that gets updated with every lease renewal, move in, move out, and rent increase.   There's a tab for Property Managers to list any cash outlay not considered an operating expense.  The operating expenses themselves don't change all that much from year to year, so by capturing the tenant income changes and one time expenditures, we can pretty much take a look at the budget any time and get an idea of the cash flow for the next few years. What we don't do is budget leasing.  That violates my Keep it Real rule.  If we budget leasing, it's just a guess, and guesses don't pay the bills.

To read the JPM article, click HERE

Do You Know CPR? We AEDo!

A huge part of our culture is being goal oriented.  We find an endless number of ways we can improve, whether that's good news or bad news I will reserve for another post.  Anyway, for 2016, Property Managers and Maintenance Engineers set a "Sharpening the Saw" goal (continuing education) of completing at least 8 hours of outside training.   We put our heads together and decided to host a CPR training course as a way of achieving the goal.  We now find ourselves red cross certified to provide first aid and CPR. Who knows when one of us will be called upon to use our training, but given our role in the buildings we manage, we all feel better having the skills we learned that day.

That day we also trained on the use of AED devices.  AED stands for Automatic Defibrillator Device. Used correctly it can supplement CPR by delivering a mild electrical current to re-start a person's heart if needed.  We learned that if an AED is around, it greatly improves the survivability of a cardiac arrest.  In August we had a representative from the Red Cross address one of our PM Huddles to discuss how to install and deploy them in our buildings.  

When we set that training goal we didn't realize it would lead to adding AED devices to our buildings, but we're happy to be taking our training as far as it can take us, because it's the right thing to do, and by adding these devices to our properties we are showing our tenants that we care about the well being of their employees. For our owners, we're taking care of their customers. I do love a win win!