When a breakdown occurs, the temptation is to call the usual person and hope everything goes well. But knowing how to choose professionals for the community with criteria, beyond the urgency of the moment, makes the difference between an office that improvises and one that manages methodically. In a context where finding available tradespeople is increasingly difficult, having a clear system for selection, quote comparison, and response time tracking has become a key skill for any property manager.
The Hidden Cost of Improvising with Tradespeople
Many offices acknowledge that works and repairs in communities are taking longer to start and finish.
Securing companies to carry out works in the community, a repair, a renovation, or interventions on facades or plumbing can take months, and the works that begin sometimes get stalled due to a lack of personnel or because the same company is attending to multiple clients at once. This scenario forces a rethink of how professionals working for the community are selected and managed, as the margin for error shrinks the scarcer the availability of trusted tradespeople becomes.
Added to this is a classic problem: without a clear system, different neighbors may call different professionals for the same issue on their own, generating duplicate trips, confusion about who authorized what, and difficulty justifying the expense to the board. Avoiding this involves centralizing the incident management of the property manager and deciding, from the office, who attends each call.
How to Choose Professionals for the Community: Criteria Before Hiring
Selecting a good professional is not just a matter of personal trust or who answers the phone first. It would be advisable to establish minimum criteria that apply to any trade before adding them to the community's usual list:
Valid insurance and guarantees: current liability insurance and, if applicable, registration in the corresponding regime.
Verifiable track record: references from other communities or managers, not just from the professional themselves.
Real response capacity: availability for emergencies and indicative deadlines for non-urgent work.
Transparency in billing: clear breakdown of materials, labor, and travel.
Suitability for the type of property: experience in buildings with similar characteristics (age, installations, applicable regulations).
Having your own directory of trusted tradespeople, reviewed and updated, avoids relying on the memory or personal agenda of a single person in the office. Platforms like the ForConnect professional directory facilitate precisely this: accessing verified professionals in different trades without starting from scratch every time a new issue arises.
Comparing Quotes with Criteria, Not Just by Price
Requesting multiple quotes is a good practice, but it only has value if they are comparable to each other. A cheaper quote that excludes materials, does not include a guarantee, or does not detail the scope of work can end up costing more in the medium term. Before presenting the options to the board or the president, it is advisable to review that all quotes:
Describe the same scope of work, with the same materials or qualities.
Include an estimated execution time.
Specify a guarantee on the work performed.
Detail whether travel or initial diagnosis has a separate cost.
When the process of comparing community renovation quotes is done in an orderly manner, the final decision is easier to justify in the minutes and generates less friction among the owners, who see that the choice is based on objective criteria and not on the personal preferences of the manager.
Response Time: The Indicator the Board Understands Without Explanation
Beyond the speed of a specific trade fixing a punctual breakdown, what a community really values is how long the entire process takes, from when the issue is communicated until it is resolved and justified. The resolution time of incidents is the number of hours or days that elapse from when a neighbor reports a breakdown until the file is closed with the work completed and justified, and it is the indicator that best summarizes the real service of a property management office.
Measuring this data by type of incident and by provider allows identifying which professionals meet deadlines and which generate recurring delays. A provider's performance can be assessed by their response times, work quality, and deadline compliance, data that should be systematically collected to make informed decisions about whom to continue working with.
Furthermore, it is important to remember that certain repairs cannot be delayed. The property manager has the competence and duty to order urgent repairs necessary to ensure the habitability, safety, and accessibility of the building immediately. Therefore, differentiating between urgent and non-urgent incidents in the management system itself helps prioritize without losing sight of the other pending tasks.
Building a Stable Network of Trusted Tradespeople
The best way to reduce reliance on luck when finding an available trade is to invest time in building, reviewing, and maintaining your own network of providers for each type of service: plumbing, electricity, air conditioning, locksmithing, renovations, or energy efficiency. This network should:
Have at least two or three valid options per trade and area.
Be reviewed periodically according to the history of response times and quality.
Be available to the entire office team, not just to the person who made the initial contact.
When an incident arises that requires a professional outside the usual network, having access to a channel to request a quote from verified professionals speeds up the process and avoids starting the search from scratch under pressure.
Conclusion
Managing incidents with tradespeople well does not depend on luck or the memory of a single manager, but on applying clear criteria to choose professionals, compare quotes objectively, and track real response times. In a market where good professionals are increasingly busy and have fewer free slots, having a reliable and well-organized network is an advantage that is noticeable both in the community's bottom line and in the peace of mind of its owners. If you want to take the next step, explore the ForConnect professional directory and discover how to simplify the selection of trusted tradespeople for your community portfolio.