Working with Contractors

For Owners and Property Managers

Many of the Repairs and Maintenance tasks on rental properties will be carried out by contractors from the various trades. Your Home Our Home has integrated powerful and very useful functionality to make this work smoothly and effectively for you.

Some of the key concepts and functionalities include:

Owners and Property Managers will often have rental properties in different cities and towns. This means that any preferred contractors will often need to be saved on a per property basis so that you can use the ones that are closest and also those that may have done work on the property previously.
Once you have your preferred list of Contractors for the various trades for each property it becomes very quick and easy to select and engage a contractor for work on a property.
Contractors can be added as entities or as individuals.
There is no cost for Contractors to use Your Home Our Home, this means that it is very easy to encourage them to sign-up. It is beneficial to you but also highly beneficial to them when they realise that they could easily end up on your preferred contractor list for a property.
Contractors can be tagged with the types of services they provide e.g. builder, electrician, plumber, joinery etc. They can function in one or more of these areas. This makes it easy to match the preferred contractor with the type of work they do.

Adding Contractors - when adding the job

Contractors can be added and invited when you add an R&M job. To do this:

Click to Add a New R&M item or click to View all R&Ms on the Repairs & Maintenance Tab on the main page.
On the 'Contractor' tab click on the buttons at the bottom of the page to either Add, Invite or Add Existing Contractor.
The 'Add New Contractor' will enable you to add a Contractor without immediately sending an invite, although you can easily click the option to send the invite immediately. This option is ideal for adding individual people as contractors (rather than entities).
The 'Invite New Contractor' just requires you to enter an email address and then you can send the invite via email. The Contractor will add more details when they complete the signup.
The 'Add Existing Contractors' is used when you already have entered a Contractor and may have used them for another property or may have just added them to your list of Contractors via the 'People and Entities' page. This is described separately.
Contractors will be listed on the 'Contractor' page. From this page you can quickly and easily select from a series of Actions/Requests for Expression of Interest, Quote, Estimate, Estimate, and Start Now. The Start Now option is used when you don't need a Quote or Estimate etc and you just want them to get on with the job. This would normally be used for Contractors that you have used previously and have found to be reliable etc.
Contractors will be able to add Quick Quotes and Estimates directly within the App. Alternatively they can upload Quotes and Estimates into the App. These will be added to the 'Quotes and Estimates' tab in the web.