How Maintenance Requests Get Lost Between Your Inbox and Your Records

How maintenance requests get lost between your inbox and your records

A resident tells you about a leak on Wednesday. A contractor texts a photo on Thursday. The board asks about it on Friday. By then, the Wednesday conversation is buried under forty other emails, the photo is in someone’s camera roll, and you’re reconstructing what just happened from memory.

Short answer: Maintenance requests get lost because the request arrives in one place and the record lives in another, and there really isn’t a convenient way to catch all of them at the moment in need.

Where do maintenance requests actually come from?

Everywhere. A 2024 study by Hemlane found that the average property generates 3.3 maintenance requests per unit per year. For a manager running five buildings at 200 units each, that is over 3,000 requests a year, arriving by: email, phone, text, hallway conversation, and board meeting.

Not only is there tons of volume but the problem is that each channel creates its own trail and record, where none of them talk to each other.

Maintenance Requests: Emails are the default

Maintenance requests are mostly sent via email. Mainly because email is what residents already know how to use. They don’t want to download an app, create an account, or learn a portal.

The question is not whether residents will email you. It’s more about what actually happens to an emailed maintenance request? In most buildings, 1 of 3 things:

– It sits in the manager’s inbox until it gets buried. – It gets forwarded to a contractor with no record that it was forwarded. – Or it gets manually retyped into a spreadsheet or work-order system at 9 p.m, and that is if the manager remembers to do that when they’re already juggling 20 different issues that day.

Each outcome stems from the same fundamental issue: the original message and the official maintenance record are treated as two separate items. One is a fleeting communication; the other is a permanent file that now becomes another action item to tackle to reconcile together. And by doing so manually invites human error.

What happens when two residents report the same problem?

Without a centralized issue log, multiple residents reporting the same leak can easily create duplicate tickets and unnecessary rework.

If Jane emails about a “hallway spill” and Bob emails 10 minutes later about a “wet carpet on Floor 3,” those arrive as two separate messages in a crowded inbox. Without a clear status on whether an email has been seen or acted on, you might end up opening two work orders, dispatching two contractors, and paying double (as a worse case scenario). At best, you’ve just wasted effort trying to investigate the two duplicates.

What about the requests that don’t come by email?

A resident stops you in the lobby. A board member mentions something at a meeting. A contractor flags a problem while on site for something else. These conversations often do not become records unless someone logs them immediately.

Hallway requests are especially risky because there is no automatic paper trail: no email, no timestamp, and often no photo, so just memory to remember which is already easy to lose on a busy day.

Property managers waste nearly 10 hours every week searching for lost information and typing in old notes.

– 9.3 hours per week: Research by McKinsey shows that workers spend over 9 hours a week looking for lost notes across different tools and inboxes.

– 18 Minutes per File: Research by Gartner shows it takes 18 minutes just to find, check, and save one document. Typing notes is not hard, but doing it hours later at a desk is tough. By the end of the day, everything that happened since 8 a.m. turns into a blur.

A good record needs four basic facts: the date, the location, who reported it, and what was found.

A date, a location, who reported it, and what was found. That is the minimum a maintenance record needs to be useful. To the next manager, to the board, to an engineer doing a reserve fund study, or to a tribunal asking what happened.

Does it matter if the record is late?

Yes, late records matter a lot because judges and courts treat missing notes as proof that work never happened.

It matters more than most managers realise. In court cases about slips and falls, judges punish buildings that have missing or late inspection notes. In a real court case (Braks v. Dundeal Canada), the judge said that having no written notes was proof that the safety checks were simply never done.

Even if the work got done, but if nobody wrote it down. In court, if there is no record, it is like the work never happened. What is the simplest fix?

The simplest fix is to save the record the exact second the request arrives

Do not wait until later at your desk. Do not rely on memory:

If a request comes by email: It should turn into a record automatically without any retyping.

If a request happens on a walk: Write it down on your phone before you leave the floor.

If a worker sends an update: Their reply should save straight to the main record automatically.

This is why we built Lunan. Lunan connects your email, texts, and site walks into one place. When a request comes in, we create the record for you instantly. The gap between when something happens and when it gets written down is where requests vanish. Close that gap with Lunan, and requests stop disappearing.