Your regular contractor is away for three weeks: how to prevent a summer backlog in repair requests

It's Tuesday morning. Your regular contractor left yesterday, gone for three weeks. Your inbox holds four new repair requests, two of them already from last week. A tenant has called back twice by now. You shuffle names on your list, call a substitute you haven't used in a while, and hope he's available. This isn't the exception. This is summer.

For you and other property managers, as well as woningcorporaties (Dutch housing associations), the summer holidays are structurally the hardest period in the maintenance process. Contractors are less available, regular contacts are away, and repair requests keep coming in regardless. The problem isn't so much the volume, but the combination of reduced contractor capacity and a management process that isn't built for that scarcity.

What turnaround times mean in practice

The average turnaround time for a repair request in property management is between 3 and 14 working days, depending on the type of repair and how the management process is set up. Simple faults, such as a leaking tap or a broken lock, are usually resolved within 2 to 5 days. More complex repairs involving multiple parties regularly stretch to 3 to 6 weeks. During the summer holidays, when contractors have less capacity, that upper limit can shift even further.

This has direct consequences for tenants. Urgent reports, such as heating failure or a water leak, should be dealt with within 24 to 48 hours. Complaints that cause inconvenience but pose no immediate risk have a target turnaround of within a week. When you can't meet those deadlines, you need an escalation path, and that's exactly what's missing from many management processes once the regular contractor isn't there.

The risk isn't only in the execution, but also in the communication. Tenants who don't know where their request stands will call back. Every follow-up call costs time you don't have when you're already busy switching between substitutes.

Prioritisation as a first measure

The most direct intervention is a clear urgency classification that you set up before the summer holidays start. That means not just a colour code in your system, but a working agreement: which category of requests always takes priority, who's allowed to pass them on to a substitute without extra approval, and what's the maximum wait time per class before you escalate?

A prioritisation matrix for technical property management links a maximum response time and turnaround time to each urgency class. The advantage of such a matrix isn't just the structure, but also that colleagues or temporary staff can act independently without you having to make every decision. That's exactly what you need when you're partly away yourself or manage multiple properties.

In practice, this means: before 1 July, make a list of all outstanding requests, assign an urgency class to each, and decide per class who the contractor will be if your regular one isn't available. Not a list of names without phone numbers, but a working backup list with confirmed availability.

The administrative chain as a hidden delay

An underestimated bottleneck is the time lost to manually passing on work orders. Calling, emailing, confirming, calling again to check whether the order was received: this costs more time per request than it seems. Research by Aedes and the Ketenstandaard (the sector's chain data standard) shows that digitally standardised exchange of repair requests saves 19 euros per work order, split between 8 euros for the housing association and 11 euros for the maintenance party. That saving comes entirely from eliminating manual actions and follow-up calls.

During the summer holidays, that counts double. When your regular contractor is away and you bring in a new party, the chance of miscommunication increases. A digital workflow, where the work order automatically reaches the contractor with all the necessary information, reduces that risk and saves time you don't have during busy periods.

This doesn't mean you need to set up an entirely new system. Sometimes a standardised order form sent by email is enough, as long as it includes all the information a new contractor needs to get started without having to ask follow-up questions: address, access instructions, type of issue, urgency and contact person.

Tenant communication as a buffer

A repair request that isn't completed on time doesn't have to lead to a frustrated tenant, as long as you communicate about its status. Most people who call back aren't impatient by nature. They call because they haven't heard anything.

A simple status update as soon as a request is scheduled, followed by a second update once the work is confirmed, prevents a large share of follow-up calls. This applies especially to requests that take longer than usual because of the summer dip. When a tenant knows their report is scheduled for week 32 and that you'll keep them informed of any changes, the threshold for calling is much higher.

Proactive communication isn't a customer service extra, it's capacity management. Every tenant you don't have to call back is time you can spend actually scheduling repairs.

The summer holidays as a stress test for your process

The summer dip among contractors is predictable. It happens at the same time every year. That also makes it the ideal moment to test how robust your management process really is. A process that only works when your regular contractors are available isn't a process, it's a dependency.

The measures you take to get through the summer are the same measures that protect you all year round against absence, illness or unexpected surges in demand. A backup list of confirmed contractors, an urgency matrix that colleagues can apply, standardised work order issuing and brief status updates for tenants: these aren't summer stopgaps. They're simply what a working maintenance process looks like.