Property maintenance is considered the most underinvested lever for increasing Net Operating Income (NOI) in the multi-family sector. It has long been seen as a necessary expense to keep buildings functional. However, this limited perspective overlooks its far-reaching impact on asset performance.
Andrea Zubow, an expert in the field, describes multi-family home maintenance, which has grown into a multi-billion dollar global industry, as the hidden supply chain of high-performing communities. Behind the scenes, maintenance influences occupancy rates, tenant retention, turnover speed, operating costs, and overall asset performance.
Amazon serves as a fitting example here. The e-commerce giant transformed non-store retail into one of the most sophisticated logistics empires in the world. Amazon's ability to deliver products to customers overnight at the click of a button was no accident. The company's success and profitability did not result from savings or seeking the cheapest warehousing and delivery options. Rather, Amazon fundamentally changed the logistics industry by creating a modernised fulfilment ecosystem near densely populated centres across the country.
This year alone, Amazon reported delivering over 1 billion items on the same or next day through increasingly localised distribution networks, generating a net profit of over $77 billion in fiscal year 2025.
Re-evaluating the total cost of maintenance
A similar strategy must now be applied to multi-family home maintenance. For communities and residents to thrive in the volatile economic environment - where skilled labour shortages and rising costs make operations even more complex - maintenance must no longer be a reactive means to an end. The next wave of NOI growth will come from operators who modernise their maintenance supply chains.
The most expensive maintenance problems are rarely found on a single invoice. They are hidden throughout the maintenance supply chain, manifesting as overhead for coordinating with vendors, premiums for emergency repairs, delayed unit turnovers, and a general depreciation of assets due to deferred maintenance. When a resident waits an extra week for a repair, or a unit sits vacant because a turnover is delayed, or multiple vendors are used to solve the same problem, these costs add up. They may never appear on an invoice, but they still affect NOI.
To maximise asset and portfolio performance, operators must move away from simply managing the cost per work order and instead focus on optimising their total cost of maintenance. This requires a shift from managing individual work orders to managing maintenance as a portfolio-wide operating system. Owners need insights into how work is executed across their properties, standardised workflows that reduce execution variability, smarter vendor coordination that minimises delays, and data-driven insights that help identify inefficiencies before they become costly problems.
Reduce fragmentation
The traditional multi-family maintenance model was designed for smaller portfolios. However, this model breaks down at larger scales. As portfolios grow across markets, the fragmented maintenance model becomes very expensive. Multi-family operators must abandon the habit of reacting to one-off maintenance issues at the property or individual unit level, and instead prioritise the holistic health of entire portfolios.
To remain competitive and achieve this NOI advantage, the adoption of intelligent operating platforms that combine software, data, and AI is crucial. These platforms provide on-site management teams, maintenance staff, technicians, and suppliers with end-to-end transparency and control over property services. Instead of simply tracking maintenance activities at the level of individual properties or units, these platforms standardise how work is routed, assigned, completed, and optimised across portfolios over long periods.
The goal is not the largest maintenance team. It is about creating an efficient operating model at scale that standardises maintenance workflows across portfolios, eliminates coordination bottlenecks, and uses data and actionable insights to prevent problems rather than merely reacting to them.
Just as consumers do not think about how their parcels arrive at their doorstep - they merely care that they arrive on time and undamaged - the same applies to residents of thriving multi-family communities. Residents desire exceptional service, a seamless process for submitting maintenance requests, timely communication updates, and the assurance that problems are resolved quickly and correctly the first time. Every delayed work order, every missed communication, every repeated service call, or every extended unit turnover represents friction within the maintenance supply chain that ultimately affects resident satisfaction, tenant retention, and NOI. The most successful multi-family operators, who will outperform in the next decade, are those who abandon reactive and fragmented maintenance practices to build intelligent operating systems that are predictable, repeatable, and transparent.
