I'm not an investor. I build software, and for the last few months my business partner and I have been working on how people keep maintenance straight across more than one property. The most useful thing that came out of it has nothing to do with software, so I'm putting the whole thing here.

The pattern goes like this: a tenant texts you, the plumber texts you, your co-owner texts you, and by Friday nobody can say which unit still has an open issue. Three properties isn't a lot of work. The trouble is that the information is spread across people and channels, so the only complete copy lives in your head, and your head is doing that job on a Saturday.

Here's the system.

1. ONE BOARD PER PROPERTY, NOT PER PERSON
Every request for Unit 4 lives in one place. Tenant, contractor, co-owner, PM: everyone who touches that unit posts to the same thread. Then close the side channels. If it's about Unit 4, it goes on the Unit 4 board. The other four steps don't work without this one.

2. EVERY REQUEST GETS A STATUS
Three states:
- OPEN: reported, nobody assigned yet
- SCHEDULED: contractor booked, date set
- DONE: finished and confirmed by the tenant
Don't let anything sit with no status. An item with no status is the one nobody's watching.

3. A TURNOVER CHECKLIST YOU RUN EVERY MOVE-OUT
- Final walkthrough plus dated photos of every room
- Deposit reconciliation started inside your state's deadline
- Cleaning scheduled
- Repairs and paint logged as OPEN items on the board
- Locks and codes changed
- Listing refreshed before the unit is show-ready
- Utilities transfer confirmed

4. MAINTENANCE INTAKE THAT'S THE SAME EVERY TIME
Which unit, what's the issue, how urgent (emergency / this week / whenever), and one photo from the tenant. The photo seems to save more wasted trips than anything else on this list. Then assign it, set it to SCHEDULED with a real date, and make sure the tenant and the contractor can both see the status without texting you to ask.

5. A FIVE-MINUTE FRIDAY REVIEW
Go through each property for anything still OPEN. If something's been open more than seven days, chase it or reschedule it. Confirm the DONEs with the tenant so they don't reopen next week.

The point of all five is that you read the board instead of trying to remember every open item.

Two things I'd like to hear from people running more doors than I've talked to:

Past ten units, where does it break for you? Is it still coordination, or does it turn into bookkeeping?

Has anyone made a shared board work with tenants directly, or do you keep tenants on a separate channel on purpose?