01 Overview
The cost is in the coordination
A dripping tap is a twenty minute job. Getting a plumber to it takes four phone calls, two missed connections, a resident who is out when the contractor arrives, and three separate people asking whether it has been fixed yet. The repair is cheap. The coordination is not.
Worse, the coordination is invisible. It never appears on a budget line, it is spread across inboxes and call logs, and it is the single clearest reason a property team feels busy without feeling productive.
Fashti captures the request properly the first time, triages it against your repair policy, raises the work order, finds a slot that suits both the resident and the contractor, confirms it, follows up afterwards, and closes the loop. Urgent cases skip all of that and reach a person within moments, with the reason they are urgent already stated.
- Structured intake that asks the diagnostic questions a technician would ask.
- First line triage against your own categories and response times.
- Work orders raised and scheduled with the contractor you would have called.
- Exception only escalation, so people see the serious cases, not the noise.
An illustrative work order queue
02 Intake and triage
Ask the right questions while the resident is still there
The difference between a good repair and a bad one is almost always the quality of the original report. A second visit costs more than the first.
Triage completes in the first exchange, not after a callback
Triage that reflects your policy
Repair categories, priority bands and target response times differ by portfolio, by owner and by jurisdiction. Fashti does not impose a scheme. Your categories are loaded in, and triage is a matter of applying them consistently rather than deciding them on the fly.
Where a request is ambiguous, it asks. Where it touches habitability, safety, gas, electricity, water ingress or anything else you have marked as never automatic, it escalates immediately regardless of how minor the wording sounds.
"There is a bit of a smell in the kitchen" can mean a full bin or a gas leak. Fashti asks the two questions that distinguish them before doing anything else, and treats the second case as an immediate escalation rather than a scheduled job.
03 Work orders and contractors
Raised, scheduled, chased, closed
A work order is only useful if somebody turns up. Most of the effort in maintenance is in the arranging.
The work order is created against the unit with the category, priority, description, photographs, access notes and the resident's availability already attached. It is written back to your property management system so your ledger and your maintenance history stay in one place.
Routed to your own on site team or to the contractor you use for that trade at that property, in the order you have set. Fashti does not introduce a new contractor network or take a margin on the work.
Fashti negotiates the appointment in both directions, which is the part that normally consumes an afternoon. The resident is offered real slots, the contractor is confirmed, access arrangements are stated plainly, and both parties are reminded.
Jobs below your authorisation threshold proceed. Anything above it, or anything where a quote exceeds the estimate, stops for approval with the quote attached. The threshold can differ by property or owner.
After the visit, the resident is asked whether the problem is actually resolved. A job is not closed because a contractor said so. Repeat reports against the same unit and category are linked, so a recurring fault becomes visible instead of being fixed three times.
Invoice matched against the work order, history filed against the unit, and the resolution time recorded for reporting. Nothing is archived without the outcome written down.
04 Urgency
The cases automation must not slow down
Most maintenance can wait until Tuesday. A small amount of it cannot wait twenty minutes, and the system has to know the difference before anybody reads the message.
Automation should raise the floor on the worst case, not just the average case. The emergency is the test.
How maintenance triage is calibrated05 The record
A maintenance history worth having
Because every job is captured the same way, the history becomes evidence rather than anecdote.
What you can finally see
- Time from report to first contact, and report to resolution
- Which units and which building systems repeat
- Which contractors turn up when they said they would
- Spend by category, property and owner
- Where a planned replacement would be cheaper than more repairs
Why it matters later
- A deposit deduction supported by a documented condition history
- A habitability complaint answered with dated evidence
- An owner report that explains the year's spend without guesswork
- A capital plan built on actual failure patterns
- A contractor renegotiation backed by performance data
06 Questions
About maintenance
Do we have to change contractors?
No. Fashti works with the trades you already use and the rates you already agreed. We do not operate a contractor network, we do not take a referral fee, and we have no interest in who does the work. Your preferred supplier order is configuration, nothing more.
How do contractors interact with it?
By text or email, the way they do now. A contractor receives the job with the address, access details, the description, photographs and the slots available, and replies in plain language to accept or propose another time. There is nothing for them to install or learn.
What if a resident reports something dangerous at two in the morning?
It is recognised as an emergency at intake, the resident is given the immediate safety guidance you have specified for that category, and your on call route is triggered at once. Quiet hours never apply to emergencies, and Fashti does not attempt to schedule its way around an urgent case.
Can it approve spending?
Only below the threshold you set, and only against the rates you have already agreed with that contractor. Above the threshold, or where a quote exceeds the original estimate, the job stops and waits for a person with the quote and the history attached.
Start the conversation
Count the phone calls in one repair
Pick a job your team handled last week and walk us through it. We will show you which steps Fashti would have taken and where it would have stopped for you.
We read every message and reply within one business day