The five-minute maintenance triage routine.

The four lanes

Every request lands in one of four lanes. Anything else is a productivity tax.

• Emergency — life safety, water, or active loss. Dispatch within the hour.
• Urgent — habitability impact (no heat, no hot water, refrigerator out). Same-day or next morning.
• Standard — quality of life, not loss. 2–5 business days.
• Scheduled — planned work, make-ready, preventive maintenance.

The five-minute routine

1. Open the queue. Sort by newest unread.
2. For each new request, set lane and category. If unit or category is missing, send a one-line clarifier and move on.
3. Flag anything in Urgent that's older than 24 hours. Those need an action today.
4. Promote anything in Scheduled where the date is within 48 hours.
5. Send your daily owner update for any property with two or more open requests.

Tie-breakers when lanes overlap

Two rules cover 90% of edge cases:

• If it's getting wetter, it's an emergency. Active leaks, sewage, supply line failures.
• If a tenant can't safely live there tonight, it's urgent. Heat in winter, AC in extreme heat, locks, refrigeration with insulin or other meds inside.

Owner approval summary — what to include

An owner approves quickly when they see scope, cost, and consequence. A good summary fits in one screen:

• Property and unit.
• What's wrong in plain language. One line.
• Recommended fix from the vendor or your judgment.
• Estimated cost with a range if the vendor hasn't quoted yet.
• What happens if we wait. Be honest. "It will fail in a week and the next call is double" is a useful sentence.
• Two photos. One wide, one close.

Recurring issue tracking

Patterns hide unless you look for them. A simple weekly review:

• Filter the last 90 days by property. Anything with three or more requests gets flagged.
• Filter by category. Three plumbing calls in one building this quarter is a story.
• Filter by vendor. If one vendor's repeat-call rate is climbing, talk to them.

In LeaseFix this lives in the Recurring Issue Radar, but you can run it in a spreadsheet too.