Property management maintenance software and property maintenance management software are the same words in a different order, and the market treats them as two categories. One is a letting platform with a maintenance module attached: it knows about tenancies, rent and units, and handles repairs as tickets raised against them. The other is a maintenance record that happens to be about buildings: it knows about assets, intervals and completed visits. Products in both use both phrases. This page is about telling them apart before a trial rather than after.
The question that separates them
Ask what the product does when nothing has gone wrong. A letting platform's maintenance module does nothing: it waits for a tenant to report a repair, because reactive work is what it was built around. A maintenance record produces this month's due list from the asset intervals whether or not anybody has complained. If the answer to the question is a shrug, the product is in the first market whatever the page says.
Which one a managing agent needs
Often both, and rarely from one vendor. An agent letting flats needs the tenancy side for rent, deposits and reactive repairs, and needs the planned side for the plant that serves the building: lifts, alarms, emergency lighting, the boiler house. Trying to run planned maintenance out of a repairs ticket queue produces exactly what you would expect, which is a regime that only exists in the months somebody remembers it.
What to check in a trial
Load ten real assets with real intervals, then look at three things: whether the due list appears without being built by hand, whether an engineer can complete a visit in under a minute, and whether you can produce a year of completed visits for one asset as a report. Those three are what the record is for, and a maintenance module attached to a letting platform usually fails the third.
Questions people ask about property management maintenance software
Is property management maintenance software different from property maintenance management software?
The phrases are used interchangeably, but the products behind them split into letting platforms with a repairs module and maintenance records built around assets and intervals. The distinguishing question is what the product does when nothing has broken.
Can one system do lettings and planned maintenance?
Some suites try. The compromise is usually the planned side, because reactive repairs are the visible daily work and the planned regime is judged once a year. If your building has plant with statutory or manufacturer intervals, check that side carefully.
We are a managing agent. Where should the asset register live?
With the building, in something you control, whoever manages it today. Registers held by an outgoing contractor or an outgoing agent are the commonest way a building loses its maintenance history.
What does Ppmly cover?
The planned side only: assets, intervals, the schedule they produce, completed visits and the defects they raise. It does not do tenancies, rent or reactive repair tickets, and it says so rather than pretending otherwise.