Digital Sign Maintenance Request Made Easy

Signature maintenance request

hey everyone my name is Lucas Hall and thank you for joining us tonight I have a very exciting presentation for you I know it's on maintenance tracking and maintenance requests but that is actually something very dear to my heart as a landlord and I hope that you you can relate so if you're here hopefully you have rental properties and handle maintenance and I'm going to teach you some best practices for that so before we get started I want to just go through some house rules really one is this is going to be anywhere from 30 to 40 minutes of education and then we're gonna dive into questions and so that is one of the best parts about these webinars that we do here at Cosi and landlord ology is that you can ask questions to us so we will do our best to answer them and and and try to help you along so that's why we're here we are recording this currently and what happens after that is if the recording was successful and it looks good it will be automatically emailed to you within a day I think we have to polish it up a bit or do something else do it then maybe it'll take a few more days after that but you'll get it and and you can look at that if you want to and go back and listen to the whole thing so if you do have questions what makes a really great experience is if you have questions and you don't want to forget about them go ahead and type them into that QA panel which is on the right hand side so you should have this little GoToWebinar panel there's a questions box if you type that in there we will get those and if they're applicable to something that we're talking about write it in there and it makes sense we will try to answer that but if not it'll just happen at the end with all the questions and we will answer them in the order in which they are received so get them in early so that we can answer those first all right so let's let's move on I have multiple screens here so bear with me but we are we are good to go so I see a lot of people joining even right now thank you all for attending Alex and Anastasia thank you for attending Carlos amen a lot of people I recognized from from just landlord ology and cozy and people I've talked to in the past we have over 200 people now right right now and more people rolling in so I'm just gonna get going I might backtrack a little bit if I see that a lot of more people join in but we're gonna get it rolling I want to be respectful of your time so next why why we are here so this is a webinar it's completely free we're not charging for this but it is about how to track maintenance requests like a pro so as you know if you have a rental property maintenance requests are a huge deal right you need to be able to assess successfully receive them and do take action on those and and treat your tenants like customers and so you're trying to make them happy and get things fixed so it can be quite a headache and to be honest I think maintenance is probably one of the biggest things on why landlords quit and why they sell their rental properties don't want to deal with a headache but there are ways to make it easier there are ways to make it so that you don't have a headache with us and that's we're going to talk about tonight so who am i why are we here why should you care this is a this is a presentation of my cozy I am an employee of cozy I'm head of in head of Industry Relations I am a landlord of over 11 years I have five properties in three states and I found it a little website called landlord ology so I put my heart and soul and even some blood sweat and tears into that and is one of the dominant sites on the internet to teach landlords how to be better so we'll get into more information about all of that but I also want to introduce two of my co-workers here who are also helping me run the presentation first and foremost we have hi everyone I'm Maggie Cooper and I am head of customer success at Cosi so I work primarily with cozies new customers to help them get started with a tool I'm based in Portland Oregon where cozy is and I'm actually a small landlord myself I have two units so I'm a big fan of cozy and I really love helping people get started with the tool we also host general demos if you are curious about how to use cozy in its complete form and Jordan my other other co-host and I host those and those are also on Wednesdays so I'm really happy to be here and I'll be helping out with questions and next we have Jordan Bradley Jordan say some things about yourself hey everyone I'm Jordan Bradley from the support team here at Cosi if you email them to us it's likely that I've probably spoken with you at some point I'm originally from LA have been in Portland here now first about two years I've pretty much been a renter for most of my adult lives so questions and concerns from landlords and tenants or something that are very personal to me and very important so I'm really happy to be here to help tonight and I really hope everyone enjoys the presentation great thank you all right so what is cozy why you know hopefully you you should know a little bit about it because you probably received some emails but if you aren't and you're new to this and you came through this through landlord ology or another means cozy is modern property management software so we make tools to help landlords and property managers succeed and and it's amazing I use it for my own properties I manage them from 3,000 miles away using cozy and not having to hire a property manager which is a bold statement but it works great it's also used by people who live near their properties to not just me so you were in good company if you use cozia already I don't know a lot of you do I currently we have about 180,000 landlords who are currently using cozy to collect rent screen tenants do other things among about 350,000 tenants and then we process about a billion dollars in rent or I should say over a billion dollars in rent a year but we're fast that's growing we do take on about 10,000 new landlords a month at least that's our current pace and that tends to grow every month so it's an exciting time and we're doing some really cool things so what is it that we do right so first and foremost we kind of take you through the whole landlord lifecycle we give you the tools you need to succeed with your rental properties how to automate those how to make them easy so first and foremost what we do is we'll start in the beginning and if you have a property that you need to list or find the 10th floor we'll help you with that marketing and that that listing of that property to various sites and on Cosi and then you can easily share that with anyone and they can apply right there it's super easy and they apply online in fact I have tenants who do apply with their phone every single time every time I have a listing they sometimes will see a property walk up the car fill out the application and as they're driving away I've got an email with you know basically everything I need to review them so tenants can apply online you can screen them with credit reports and background checks and then if you find somebody you like and want them to move into your property then you can go and get them set up with online rent payments that's one of our core features they can pay rent with a bank account with a credit card with a debit card with prepaid card and everything about that is really easy to use for both parties then once your once you have somebody in there and you're handling maintenance expenses we'll help you track that too so this particular webinar is about just the maintenance aspect of it but as a whole you can you can handle all those repairs and then you can track the expenses that you incur for each of your property so that you have something nice and easy to read during tax time when you're trying to fill out your your Schedule E or when you're you have something that you need to give to your accountant to do your taxes for you it's it's painfully simple and then last we do education so that's part of this we're here at a webinar it's fun I actually really enjoy doing these and helping people learn how to be better and more efficient that's that's why we're here so we do online education we have landlord ology we have webinars we have podcasts all these other things so this website landlord ology is what I created years and years ago but it's since become part of Cosi so it is our educational platform it has a lot of really great resources I suspect especially the state law guides that are there they were there just really definitive really useful you can go see if you know what you're obligated to do according to your state statutes and among other things that give it a shot you know look out go there look out for look for something you're you know whatever whatever you have in trouble with it's probably in there just do a search for you know expenses or maintenance or whatever when there's a thought of articles little help so moving forward all of that is 100% free so you can do all of that as a landlord and you can track and handle your tenants and your maintenance and your expenses and your applications and listings and and rent all of that is free so we we make money and this is always the next question right we do make money we we make money on the credit reporting background check but the tenant also pays for that so you you don't have to pay for anything even the transaction fees are our null they don't they don't they don't pay for that you don't pay for that if a tenant does pay with a credit card or credit card for rent they do pay a transaction fee but that's just Visa and MasterCard not choosing to waive their fee but everything else even you know if they pay rent with a bank account it's completely free so free for you always and then there's just minor fees for the tenant if they participate in some of those things so it's it's really a good experience plus if you do order a background check or a credit report from a tenant they get a copy of that as well so it's they're actually getting something for their money moving on let's let's talk about some basic tips so let's set the stage for maintenance right that's why we're here so tips for basic maintenance success with your rental properties as we discuss it's truly a headache first and foremost you need to be very clear in your lease about what the responsibilities of you and your land your tenant so I if you expect your tenant to mow the grass like you need to make sure you say that it's not it's not common knowledge and I think you you need to be you know a very big outline or a very big section your lease on this so if you don't have that think about what you want to do you know and then add that in as an addendum or add that into your next leased built into the major part of the contract because of ones that's in the contract and it's a it's pretty much set in stone so to empower your tenants to make the place a home so I always tell my tenants it's like they ask basic things like hey can I paint well that's a whole nother conversation but like generally speaking I want to tell them like well hey listen you know need to be respectful and keep the place nice and I want you to make it your home so nothing is irreversible I shouldn't say nothing but most things aren't irreversible and they will pay for any damages they they caused but you want them to embrace the fact that it's a home and not just your place because once they feel like it's their home then they will actually take steps to maintain it the best they can and if there's something they don't feel comfortable doing or they think you should do then they will let you know quickly right because people protect their home but people don't protect rental properties they don't protect somebody else's property so you want them to feel like it's theirs that's so key so that emotional connection if they do if they do actually submit or maintance request or tell you about something please respond quickly that it that solves a lot of problems so first I always get back to them hopefully within an hour so I'm not solving the problem I'm just acknowledging that they sent something right I'm like hey thanks a lot like I'll get back to you that's all you have to do and if you can do that with a smile you're gonna make them really really happy so first and foremost respond quickly but then try it you know if there's something you can do quickly to solve from do that too a lot of times it's just informing them how to operate the thermostat like maybe that's it you know other times the thermostat might be broken so you know do what you can to respond quickly and then and then follow up hopefully with repairs or a plan of action within 24 hours and so number four schedule annual maintenance what I do if for things like gutter cleaning you know or things where I need to sign up for a like maybe a lawn mowing contract with that company I will set that in as a calendar invite like I will just say you know the first of September every year I need to go ahead and schedule like a heating contract right so I'll do that set it up make it automatic make it an annual thing an annual invite that alerts you every year and you won't forget right but more on a bigger picture here go Google a life expectancy chart specifically for for maintenance or for rental properties not for for animals or people or whatever but like a life expectancy chart for appliances specifically so for the big ticket items like your roof your water heater your your floors even you know there's there's things that we are out you know you need to take care of them and then you need to replace them eventually especially most of the kitchen appliances so know when you bought them or know how old they are at least and most of those things will have a sticker on them somewhere the roof maybe not but you know your water heater should have something on there and then put that in a spreadsheet and you can go google a temple I think even Google Spreadsheets or Google sheets has a number of life expectancy charts where you can you can just copy that template right and then you'll know four years out like when you're gonna have to replace something so it's really helpful to know that oh the water heater is probably attend your water heater so I probably need to replace this you know in the next three years and then you can allocate money to prepare for that so you don't get surprised by these massive capital expenses so I'm not going to touch on it too much but you generally want to have you know three to six months worth of savings in a reserve account for stuff like that so build up your rental income and then set that aside I think that's just wise finances okay moving on there we go okay so what next right so we okay we talked about schedules we talked about life expenses charts we've talked about pushing off some of those responsibilities to your tenant in the lease but when something does happen you have to take care of it you know especially if it's your responsibility and and you are ultimately responsible for insuring habitability so even if even if there was something the tenant didn't do you are actually officially on the hook when it comes to habitability and making sure that property isn't habitable but what do you do you know do you fix it yourself or do you hire a pro so let's talk about that so here are my general ideas now these are my opinions and I've been a landlord for a number of years so I've tried to do a lot of stuff myself to save money now that doesn't always work out well but but for the majority of time it does and there's things you can do to save a lot of money so when did Do It Yourself here are some general rules it's going to be different for everybody but this is what I like to say if you live within 20 minutes the property then you can probably do it yourself or at least you can do maintenance yourself because then you can go over you can fix that that running toilet you could you can deal with a light switch whatever you need to do and it's not it's not like an all-day ordeal you know I had a actually my father had a property that was he lived near DC it was in Baltimore and he would have to travel many hours to get there sometimes and it's been all day and then travel back and it became quite a hassle because it was it was pretty far away and then if you feel like you're handy now I think you know we all kind of have this this impression of ourself when it comes to fixing stuff someone was full on though you know whatever I touch the screwdriver like I'm gonna break something and other people have a curiosity right so if you do have a curiosity to learn how to be handy or you know that you know your way around a toolshed you know you need to be honest with yourself about that and if you want to embrace it and I think it's a good thing to try it right so three do you have time do you have 20 kids I shouldn't say 20 kids but if you have ten kids but I know a few people who do you may not want to be the guy fixing stuff right because you have up there were more important responsibilities but if if you don't have a lot of time or you don't think you have enough time to try it then don't because it's just gonna end badly but if you have that time go for it then if you want or need to save money so some people just don't have the profit to to hire out a lot of professionals I mean I hired mr. plumber a couple years ago now and all he did was snake a drain for ten minutes and the bill was 499 dollars it was ridiculous and I know that guy didn't have an you know any more skill than I did he just had the right tools so let's figure out how to fix that and I could buy out an inaugural $4.99 and do it myself forever now maybe I don't want to but you know that's the point like how can you save money if you don't have a profitable rental portfolio then then you may need to figure out ways to cut cost and then number five one of the best ways for you to learn if you have that design Home Depot has a rack of books at every like near the checkout right every home and Depot has this date when people produces some amazing books that actually have a lot of pictures and I'm sure Lowe's has the same thing too the pictures are great they're really easy to understand and for both both excuse me most basic tasks it's perfect it's all you need like you can lay that thing out and you can fix a broken light switch and and you're done now you know I think they're worth the investment and then if you don't even want to buy a book or you're a digital person you know YouTube is a wealth of resource now you have to be careful about who you're watching because it doesn't mean they know any more than you but it's a really good resource to explore and learn so when do you hire a pro like how do you know really when it's over your head because if you're just starting you don't know what you know so the general rules are if if you have electrical issues right now electrical is a little more challenging than most repairs but if you have something that needs replacing or the wall is sparking it's probably better to hire electrician when there are broken pipes that's a huge deal like I've replaced multiple faucets multiple toilets multiple shower cartridges things like that all that stuff is pretty easy and actually the instructions that come with those manuals tell you how to do it but but if I have a broken pipe or a drippy joint or something like I really don't I can but I don't want to mess with soldering and anything that deals with like high voltage electricity anything that deals with like an open flame or things that spark or create like a luminescent light that actually burns my retina like you just don't want to do that so I choose to hire those out any kind of a roof repairs like I have a daughter that I want to see get married and graduate and live her life and I don't want to fall off a roof before that happens so I usually don't do any sort of roofing myself anything that requires the certification or a license is a big deal so there are county rules and county ordinances and license requirements that say that this type of thing should be done by a licensed professional I always think you should hire a licensed professional if it's something that you don't want do or can't do but some things like like you know heavy up being an electrical panel like that's just way out of my league and I really want someone who knows what they're doing so big things like that really you should make sure that they're sort of they have a certified certification or license and then number five if you feel like it's unsafe don't do it because it's just not worth the risk right hire somebody out it's fine it's not gonna it's not gonna hurt you to hire somebody out but it might hurt you if you try it yourself moving on if you want to hire somebody here's what you can do so I always recommend you hire a little black book of contractors now what I mean by that is you should have a list it can be a spreadsheet it can be a literal little black book and you you basically keep record of who you've worked with and who you've paid now you can probably goes back through receipts and invoices and figure that out and have records of who who was great who you can count you can't and eventually the goal is that you have a list of handyman or plumbers electricians that you know you can count on and you trust them to go on your property alone even if you need to or if they need to because if the basements flooding like you might need to send somebody over there at midnight just in case you know just to deal with it you need to be able to trust them but if you don't have something like that then you can use these sources so these are some of my favorite I've used them all in at one time or another there's companies like handy Andy Angie's List which i think is probably the most well known company called task easy which does mostly lawncare homeadvisor which is huge Angela Angie's List and homeadvisor are now one company so they still are different websites but they're one one company and then Home Depot acquired a company called red beacon which was really popular especially on the west coast but now that's called Home Depot Pro referral and then another company called talk local which is kind of neat because it has this app that you know instantly connects you with them so that's pretty cool so check these out you know as you start to work with these companies and you start to work with contractors it'll be very clear who the winners are and if you find something you like then just stick with them don't go through home next time go straight to that person and you'll build a rapport in a relationship and they'll treat you right and they'll charge you less and you know it'll work out hopefully you'll build that list up so moving on this is the most important thing so thank you if you take away one thing out of this entire webinar I want you to know that maintenance for your properties is truly all about communication you're your liaison between the contractor and the tenants or you're trying to make the tenants happy it's all about communication the more you communicate and the more transparent you are the easier it's going to be so we surveyed a number of people a lot of you fill that out as you signed up and we surveyed a number of cozy customers as well and we asked them how do you currently track maintenance for us what's the what's the mechanism at which you receive these and hands-down the winner was text messaging so that shouldn't surprise anyone I received most of my text messages or have in the past through text messaging and it's just you know the the next generation of tenants is just comfortable with it so not a surprise people could answer more than one so it between text and email they were the two winners phone calls next just because a lot of things require a conversation and you know over the phone but other than that you know three other ones when we through we through carrier pigeon in there just as a joke but some people have voted for it in person written notes all that stuff didn't hold a light to those so moving on what are the real challenges right so these are how we're using it these are what we're doing but what does that really mean why is that difficult well if you have a if you're receiving maintenance requests through text messages like most people are you don't really have an official record like yeah you've got that text message but most people don't realize that your iPhone or Android goes through and deletes text messages after 90 days or 120 days or whatever it is that you've got it set for some people have it at 30 days so imagine you know you've trying to produce this official record and you find out your phones deleted it too it's also hard to find I don't know if you've ever tried to cycle through your text messages from like a month ago and you're sitting there and scrolling forever and ever and it's hard to explain - there's no central location for all requests now if you ever had to produce a I should say produce that record or cycle through just all the records and find them you you wouldn't be able to so they're scattered over multiple text messages or multiple emos or both or phone calls I mean it'll have a record of that even because you can't document it so it not having that central location can be very complicated for when you're trying to handle things I know I know personally with having big projects so number three you know it's easy to forget or lose that's a no-brainer and then for you know tenants aren't really sure how to communicate with you if you tell them hey contact me they're like okay well what does that mean does that mean Facebook messenger can i Skype them can I like send a text message can I email can I send a carrier pigeon they're not quite sure so I do recommend that you specified very clearly in your lease what you want them to do for maintenance and generally how to contact you so this is this is what I say set some rules set set the precedence of what you want them to do do that in the lease do that in a separate views of paper also do that any note whatever it is make sure they understand and then to set up an official channel to communicate so tell them specifically I want you to do this in this scenario make it super easy that's a no-brainer if we're all creatures of comfort.if it's too hard to do then people aren't going to do it so I specifically hate things where my tenants are forced to open up some other third party that they've never used ever in their life and they're never going to use it again except for that one instance that's just ridiculous two or four B be transparent make sure that you you don't hide anything from them I mean you've got your private records but like make sure that you're you're being open and transparent about what's happening with that maintenance repair so that they feel like you were actually working on it the worst thing is when you're you go radio silent and they don't have heard from you in weeks and they think he's not doing anything so here are my rules I told my tenants if it's a life-threatening emergency call 9-1-1 don't even bother with me at that moment just call 9-1-1 and I've had instances where a tenants smell gas and they call me and I'm like no you need to call 9-1-1 right now and get the fire department out there to make sure that the place isn't going to blow up right and it's usually they just leave the oven on or something and you know but it's worth dealing with the emergency services too if if there is property damage like a basement is flooding or there's an open leak or like the roof is collapsing right anything like that hopefully you never get to that point but if it's happening like that please call me or text me immediately I don't really care what time it is because if the basement is flooding I'd like to know at 1:00 in the morning I really would so I can handle it I don't want to wait six hours and then I've got two feet of water in my basement right so let tell me call me text me immediately and I actually tell my tenants use your good judgment right a lot of landlords say oh I don't want to get calls about toilets you know clogged toilets that at midnight and I'll be honest with you in 11 years I've never had that it doesn't it doesn't matter like tenants are smart they're gonna they're only gonna call you when they need you and they're gonna look at the toilet and say I don't really need to call my landlord midnight so that's you know some people don't give them enough credit and then I told my tenants for everything else for all of their maintenance items just file a ticket and cozy it's real easy and that way it's all very transparent so let's move on with that so online maintenance requests and expense tracking so let's talk about that so a lot of you received an email announcement recently about Cozy having two new features expense tracking and maintenance request and I'll show you what I do with my with my tenants so it's really easy operates on a phone oops let's go so what we're gonna do next is I'm actually just gonna show it to you I'm gonna work with with my co-workers here Maggie specifically and we're gonna we're gonna actually demo that for you so if you have a cozy account and if you don't you can sign up at just cozy Co slash sign up or just cozy Co you can see it there on the home page and you can create an account as you can see these are these are some of some example properties if you you can do a lot of stuff of cozy but one in particular is maintenance so what I'm gonna do here is I'm going to click on this property or forfor 944 Maura I'm going to create a new request and if I were a landlord and let's say a my tenant wants to let's do this actually my tenant wants to submit I mean is request so let's I think did dry be better if we actually did this from the tenants perspective so let's do this Maggie how are you feeling right now let's have you let's see we can share screen with you let's we're gonna change it up and get a little fancy here yeah love to see all right Maggie my transfer you ever know these do all right okay so you should see my screen this is a tenant view so when your title logs in their first going to be brought to their payments portal we decided to prioritize that because the majority of tenants that's what they're going to be logging in to do in cozy is set up payments but when it's time to submit maintenance requests all you'll need to do bear with me here is go into this maintenance button here and this is on the tenant side of things they're going to very easily click apology's new request and then all they'll need to do is just fill out the title so let's say leaking faucet in kitchen and a message to you so let's say I'm Lucas's tenant hey Lucas the sink is dripping in the kitchen yeah come take a look I can also add any photos videos or other files so if I wanted to take a quick photo attach it here on my phone cozy is totally mobile compatible so your tenants can actually from their phone log into cozy send this request out of photo or video attach it here and then you'll get an email notification and Lucas will be showing that landlord process here in just a little bit so I can add any files if I'd like including PDFs and then I'll click request and that will send Lucas a message and it will also start this correspondence in my cozy accounts and you'll see from Lucas's point of view that he'll have a very similar view of the landlord set of things so I'm gonna pass it back to you Lucas okay alright do you guys see that perfect okay so while while we were transferring the screen back to me her ticket just came through so this leaking faucet in kitchen is exactly what she just fell out and if I click on that I can see Willa submitted this this notification so I get this so what happens behind the scenes is that the landlord and all roommates get notification of this through an email so if they also happen to be logging into their cozy account they'll see it too but most people don't live inside their account so they get an email right away and then they can click on that and it takes them right here and so I get this it's it's easy I can forward that email on but I'm gonna do this and I'm gonna say hey thanks Willa I'll stop by tomorrow at 4 and then if I want to I could submit videos or photos which is you know pretty cool I don't know if a video of a dripping sink is that interesting but I did have an instance where my tenant submitted a video of a dripping sink and it was weird because it was actually spraying at the top and so I couldn't understand how that was happening and till he showed me the video and I realized very quickly it was just a little knob so by I was able to assess the video and actually respond to him very quickly and say get a screwdriver and just tighten that bolt and you're and that's exactly what he did and it was fine I didn't have to go over there didn't have to deal with it it was really easy so I can do this I can just say add a comment and you can see here all these tenants that are on the right-hand side getting notified as well so they are kept in the loop so any of those tenants can also comment on it and if let's say I'm gonna pass it well actually I won't pass it back I'll hold it so if Maggie is now getting this notification and you know she or one of our other roommates maybe responds and says something like you know I'm not available for but can you come at 5:00 or or like hey that's great thanks a lot whatever it is any of them can respond any of them can continue this conversation so let me refresh my screen and see what we got [Music] so well the other thing I can show you is well let's do this first okay so what else I can do here is that I can actually leave a private note for myself so let's say there was a big deal with with the plumbing right and I needed to hire out somebody I could check this box and as you can see right there it goes from add a comment to private note and I can say you know I called ABC plumbing and they wanted five hundred dollars or you know mr. plumber wanted two hundred and then I could even attach all of their estimates to and that wouldn't get shared either so I can do all that I can I can create these private notes for myself so that as I'm processing the maintenance ticket I can I can create a record of all of those estimates all of those notes all those pictures and I keep it in here and only the things that I want to share with my tenants get shared so they won't see any of that so I'm gonna go ahead and add that private note and you can see here it says hidden from tenants so oh here we go yeah as as I was doing that the other notification came through she said thanks so if I end up you know needing to give proper notice and I say okay whoops sorry it wasn't proper notice I'm coming over I'm coming over Friday or let's say Saturday because that's more than 24 hours then that's that's all I need to do so you know you can use this to get proper notice as well it's pretty easy now what's really cool about it is that I can I can handle and track these things so yeah I've got these three let's say this one for example I can I can close this request if I'm all done with it I can just close it down yes close this request and then I go back to my maintenance tab and I've only got three and I've got one here so I can I never lose them you never can quite delete them because they are a records for you but but you can certainly archive them and close them so that you don't have to see him anymore now moving on let's say if I wanted to create an expense from this let's say that I did hire ABC or mr. plumber because that's cheaper mr. plumber it was 200 bucks I could create an expense right here there's a little quick link to it and what it does is it then opens up this expense form with some of the information filled out already so for example I could call this as mr. plumber and then the data payment was today if I had a receipt I could just add that here and uploads it and keeps it and then it already knows what property it's for because it came from the maintenance ticket the $200 I put in was just in the notes section so they don't it doesn't know it automatically Turner bucks it assumes because it's a maintenance item that it falls into the repair category and these these categories are actually specified by the IRS they match the schedule II on your 1040 IRS form perfectly so it makes it really easy for tax time but we you can change that if you want to but most the time it'll be repairs and then the the title of that maintenance ticket it actually gets put in the description and I can add to it you know I could call this broken lever or something and then if I if I had multiple items I could split those across multiple receipts and then hit save and while I'm now able to track these in the expenses category expenses section and I'm able to show them here I can sort them my property I can sort them by category it's just a really easy way to track everything so in this example here I've got a Home Depot receipt and I you can actually go and you can see the actual receipt you can open that up it's pretty nice now what I also want to show you is how to get that information out so if I go and I I look at I look at here okay so this is a sample report this is one of the reports you can get from cozy and it's it's really easy it's in the reports section I'll show you what that looks like in real quick if you just click on export data on the left-hand side here you can then choose payments or expenses and you can pick which properties or all properties or whatever and and part of that massive data export you can get that in a spreadsheet but you'll also get this document which what it does is it summarizes all of your operating operating expenses I shouldn't say operating it your your one-time expenses the ones you can fully deduct and so you have things here these are the categories for the IRS 1040 Schedule E so you could take this one document hand it off to your accountant or use it when you're filling through TurboTax or something to do your own taxes and you'll have all the summary information that you need you can also download all of the receipts in an image format and you can pass those off to an auditor if you need to if you do get audited you have all the receipts already and cosey you can get those out and hand them off it's real easy and it just makes it simple like I can't tell you how many years I spent you know hours or on tax time trying to summarize these categories because they were spread out and they were I was attracted under weird category names and whatever with other different systems but this is super easy so that's what I love most about the expense tracking tool now if you want to do something like what I did here where I have some tenants where I actually created a maintenance request where I just said hey guys I love to you know I would love to have you use maintenance tracking for cozy or with cozy that's going to be my new way of doing it I can give you that so that that language it's right here so I have a document it's just got a sample template that you can use and customize all you want if you want to download that or this this expense tracking sample then you can do that in the right hand side you have a GoToWebinar control panel there that has a section called handouts and it says hand that's two of five so go check that out it's on the right hand side you can download those so you click on the link or or right-click and save as and depends on what what type of computer you're using but you can download those and and use that template to notify your your tenants and so you can open up that ticket see if they respond you know and just close that when you're ready so I think that's it for now so let me go let me open up the the other thing here okay so I gave you those two samples and I think we covered everything so moving on great we're making great time let's go into Q&A I saw a lot of questions coming through and feel free to take this time right now to ask any question you want in the question panel if it's a part of the if you want to ask about Cozy and how things work that's great if you want to ask my general maintenance and how to keep track of that that's fine too so we'll do our best to answer all of your questions so Maggie and Jordan do you want to go ahead and start feeding us questions all right first question it goes back to the beginning when you're talking about making your tense at home so that's great now how do you do it so how do you make your tense feel at home so first and foremost you just really want to make them feel welcome so the best way to do that from the get-go is just to give them a small welcome package so I like to personally go up I should preface this I used to give them like pizza and Target gift cards and all that and it just it really didn't go over well I like you know wooden really wants pizza and let's just say it's moving day yeah pizza is easy but it's nice you know you're sweaty what you really need is a shower right so what I would do is I would create a what I call my my $10 welcome packet and I would just buy a like an individual roll of paper towels that's like wrapped up in the plastic I'd buy an individual toilet paper I'd buy a little bar of hotel soap for you know dollar at the at Target or grocery store and and then a shower liner so I would do those things and I would just leave them there like on the counter in the bathroom and I never actually started receiving thank-yous until I started giving out toilet paper like it was the weirdest thing so tenants would move in and they would not realize that most showers don't come with shower curtains or liners and I would just give them that cheap curtain that you get the or the liner that you get at the dollar store like it really is easy nothing special but it enabled them to take showers like they're moving their sweaty they want soap they want shower they want toilet paper like they want that stuff and if I can meet that need they they think oh this is actually a landlord who knows the drill and he knows what I really need instead of just pizza like so that's what I would do to make him feel welcome that always hit it off on the right foot and it was only like ten bucks other than that you know open communication is key to making them feel warm and welcoming they feel like they can reach you then they will be respectful and that's not always true but I think most the time in my experience it is if you treat them like like customers and treat them with respect they will do the same great question thank you all right next question is from Darrell yes do you support the ability for property managers to independently input minions requests on behalf of tenants yes yes good question so let me let me pull that open right now so if I go back to our [Music] minutes so here this is the landlord view so what you're seeing right now is is the landlord view and you at a new request at any time so if I wanted to create a new request at this property with these tenants I can go in and it looks very similar to the tenant view so I would just type in whatever I want it and then I can add in that and then I gotta have videos and this is very common so most the time you know when if you're not fully using the system tenants will still text you and tenants will call you and they will stop by your office or whatever and you need to be be able to get that in there so yes you can do that it just kicks it off and it notifies everybody and then you can have that discussion there even if your tenants don't participate in that process or they choose not to respond at all at least you have a document so that's that's the best way to do it all right next question we've had a few people ask is there a way to create a maintenance request for an entire property not just a single unit yes so currently the way it works in Cosi is that we want you to be able to communicate with a specific group of tenants so it's done at the unit level so you can you know when you have a maintenance request it's designed to be a communication tool rather than just a tracker for you now it's something that we've considered but at least for this v1 you have to ask at least assign a maintenance request to a particular unit and if your tenants fill it out anyway if they're the ones initiating then it's gonna be a son of that unit in the first place but there are comments in areas where you're where you want to attract the maintenance of the gutters for the whole building for the apartment building and for that you would either have to sign into a single unit or just not put it in cozy so it first and foremost it's a communication tool about maintenance rather than just your own personal spreadsheet so something we're nothing like considering adding in the future all right next question is from Dante will there ever be a feature to share these requests with someone else like a handyman Dante I think let's see okay okay great perfect yes hey Dante what's up man so yes so V one version one of this is just add just between Landlord and Tenant we are actively actually building that right now so that you will have a little share link you can share any requests with any any person any email address or anybody else so that that's actually one of the big requirements is like hey I just want to be able to offload this to my handyman and send him over so the goal is that you get this request you kind of acknowledge its its legitimacy and then you can assign that to your handyman or a plumber or whatever if you you know if if you if you want so it's really just sharing a link with them they can click on the link see the see the request see the the pictures and the video and try to design for what's going on and then they can even figure out how to you know time to get over there and coordinate that so so yes absolutely that is that is on the roadmap and that is version 2 which we're working on right now so great question thank you [Music] here's a usage question Tim asks can I track maintenance that I perform as part of regular maintenance like not requested from tenants or things that are scheduled anubias gotcha so it kind of goes back to the question two questions ago where yes it's not maintenance this is a maintenance request tool so it's not necessarily maintenance tracking tool for you to track things as you would normally in a spreadsheet so yes we will be looking into building that so that you don't necessarily have to assign a property or even a unit to it potentially but for now it's it's really to communicate those things with your tenants so if you have something that has no relation to a property at all I suppose or a particular group of tenants then it's not really a maintenance request but I suppose like if you just know you want to replace the water heater next month then you could put that in and you're gonna have to notify your tenants anyway you know about a plumber coming over to deal with it so you can you can do that so cool all right here's a question for Merrill just cozy directly connect landlords with maintenance Prince ah yes that was also a feature request that we've been getting since we launched this feature so so no not yet but we are actively pursuing partnerships and so the the maintenance pros the thing the ones we mentioned at least in this presentation about homeadvisor Angie's List all that that I assume that's what you're talking about so if you need a plumber can you find them in cozy and the answer's no not right now but we realized there's a need for it so that would make it really nice right I mean the whole big picture is for you to be able to find this and deal with this maintenance tracking or maintenance request and then be able to assign somebody to it so we're working on it but thank you all right here's a question from Sheila and I think you kind of already touched on it but I think it'd be good to clarify can you send a message to all of your tenants so routine maintenance or anything like your vacation schedule for instance yeah so yes so if you whenever you fill out this maintenance thing you can just it just goes to all the tenants in that unit so there's no way to to notify all of your tenants across the board because that's not really a maintenance issue I mean this is a main in striking too but we've seen people we have seen people use it in that capacity where you do use it as a notification tool I suppose and that's it it has nothing to do with maintenance it's pretty neat to watch people and see how they're they're using the tool differently than what we expected but but if anything it has proven the need to be able to have some sort of internal communication tool where you just take a unit pick a property or pick everybody and you say I just want to send this message so we're actually looking at building some of them that like that for 2017 so all right 2018 I'm sorry but good question and it's totally related all right here's a question from Tyler is there a plan to have maintenance request notifications sent through text people is reading your mind Lucas I guess though so text messaging yes yes that's going to be a updated version of this so of course like you know if you get a maintenance ticket remaining that's requests that's like hey there's a leak like yeah maybe they should have been calling you in the first place because there's no water in the basement but but in case they didn't you want to be notified really quickly and yes we are we are actually the process of building some sort of text notification feature for this so it's actually a bigger holistic approach so we're taking because we have a lot of notifications and cozy notifications like hey your your rent or just the positive rent or you know they pay their deposit or or your lease is ending or things like that so there's a couple other notifications that would really be useful as a text message so yeah I mean we're looking into that and that's certainly on the roadmap for the near future so it really applies to maintenance I think all right next question those wrecks in Jenny asked this do your tenants have to be using Cosi payments to use the main enterprise feature okay yeah good question so they have to be in cozy so your tenants have to have an account and if they've applied your property or they're paying rent or they've been screened or anything like that they already have an account and they just have to be assigned to an active lease so if if they're in your property and you're using your using cose for some sort of payments with any of those tenants on that lease then any of the other tenants can also submit and handle maintenance requests so so yes they have to be on a lease and cozy and it doesn't mean that that particular tenant actually has to be paying rent if that makes any sense so for example if you have a roommate of or a a house that's got four roommates but only one of them is responsible for paying the rent but they're all on there they can all see it they can all they're all active participants or whatever you know inside cozy they all can submit maintenance requests but there does have to be an active lease and what that means and cozy that at least one person is actually collecting rent or paying rent so good good clarification thank you asking that all right here is a question from Scott rice hey Scott and I said I don't normally say last names but I just did Scott asks can you make a handout we can give tenants on how to submit the request okay yeah no good question so we could we could make a handout we also have a help guide so we have a whole section of let's go find that I'll just so here actually this is the maintenance request page on cose if I go and I look up help Docs Kazuko we will if we haven't already we will add maintenance request sections here and what I found the best thing to do is honestly just just send your tenants there like if you want a printout you could print out the page but if you if you'd rather just point them to a URL for them to read and you know that's always going to be update you could do that too so that would be my suggestion I always just point my tenants to this page and let them play around I actually want them to become be familiar with how cozy works and know that they can self serve themselves and get the answers they need because I don't always want them coming to me for technical issues or problems that they might think are with the product itself so they can figure that out here with a lot of these videos and a lot of guts so good question and the the pages that will have there for maintenance will be very similar to probably what you would get them all right here's a question from John why is Yelp not listed in the service providers list ah good question so it it wasn't intentional I've used Yelp a lot but I also find that Yelp is a little bit polluted I don't know how to say that but in the same way that Craigslist for many cities got a little spammy you know Yelp is starting to get that way in my opinion so Oh Yelp doesn't necessarily verify everybody and they don't they don't guarantee quality and so you'll find businesses you know that didn't ever want to be on yo and they don't know why they're on Yelp where is it if you find business songs businesses on Angie's List or homeadvisor that business wants to be there and they actively pursued it so they often pay a fee to be on there and it's it's a just a simple screening technique you know it's like okay this is a real business so Yelp is good I mean take a look at Yelp and look around and call and you do what you want but but there's other tools out there they're completely free to use and they tend to screen a little bit better so that this is my opinion all right here's a question from John will the landlord be able to see the description of the problem when the email alert comes in or can it will may be seen upon logging into cozy yeah so Maggie did you have any emails that you wanted to show let's do that I'll change I'll change it over to you okay perfect [Music] okay I'm opening a few screenshots of some different sample messages and I will show those to you now all right okay so if you as a landlord decided you'd like to submit a request to your tenant or logger request this is what your tenant would see they would get an email saying your landlord has submitted a new maintenance request and it will have the address of their unit so it will have a summary of the landlord's name the data was submitted and the issue subject line and the description that you've given it and so they would be able to go in to cozy and they'd be able to see that page we're showing earlier where they could track it all I've also got another one of what it looks like if a roommate submits the maintenance requests so your tenants would see that their roommates have submitted a request and I find this personally very helpful because there's been instances where I will have you know the right-hand doesn't always talk to the left-hand and I have all of the ten contacting me about it and I really need just one point of contact and it just makes communication a lot easier so this is a really nice way to have all your tenants looped in although emails you'll notice have are very similar formatted you can see this one is actually one that Lukas recently said about announcing a maintenance request and he actually used that through cosy and just such as tenants a note so you'll see that it will have the description subject line and then anytime you want to reply to that message or your tenant wants to reply to that message they'll just click this view maintenance request and be able to reply to you right then and then you can go back and forth with communication all right back to you Lucas you