After-hours/emergency-only service for self-managing landlords

[Sean Fisher]

Hello,

My wife and I are self-managing our two properties and are comfortable fielding calls for maintenance requests and emergencies during "normal business hours." However, we occasionally go out of town and into areas where we have no cell service, and we would prefer to delegate emergency calls during off hours. In the past we've relied on finding a friend/acquaintance who is willing to be "on-call" while we're gone.

I've been trying to find a service that will cover these scenarios:

1. Available during off-hours for emergency-only calls to find and dispatch necessary contractors - plus if they have their own contractors they can send so I don't have to provide them a big list
2. We can "turn on" or schedule full maintenance coverage for times when we will be unavailable

Just at the online research stage (i.e., I haven't actually called and talked to anybody yet), but every property management company I find bills itself as "full service" and wants to take over leasing, collecting rent, etc. I just want a maintenance backup and ad-hoc solution. 

So my question is: is this a common thing? Is there a name for this type of service and I just don't know the key words to Google?

Properties are in Houston, TX area if that helps.

[Will Gaston]

@Sean Fisher I'm unaware of a service that does this but I agree it probably exists.

What if you provided your tenant with a list of an approved electrician, plumber, and HVAC company instead? Seems like you could cut out the middleman if you put some ground rules in place.