Tracking maintenance requests without the chaos

A leaking faucet gets texted to one person. A broken buzzer goes to a voicemail nobody checks. A furnace complaint lives on a sticky note. Multiply that across a handful of units and the problem is not the repairs, it is knowing what was reported, when, and whether anyone did anything about it.

For Ontario landlords and property managers, that scattered trail is more than an annoyance. It is the difference between a clean record and a guessing game the day a tenant escalates. Here is how to track rental maintenance requests so nothing slips, without adding hours of admin.

How do you track rental maintenance requests without losing any?

The chaos almost never comes from too many repairs. It comes from too many places a request can land. Fix the intake and the tracking gets easy.

What does Ontario law expect from landlords on repairs?

The short answer: keep the unit in a good state of repair and fit to live in, whether or not the tenant knew about the problem before renting.

Under the Residential Tenancies Act, 2006, a landlord is responsible for maintaining the rental unit and complying with health, safety, and maintenance standards. The Act does not hand you a template for how to log requests, but it makes clear the duty sits with the landlord. If a dispute reaches the Landlord and Tenant Board, the practical way to show you responded is a dated record of what was reported and what you did.

A good tracking habit is not paperwork for its own sake. It is the evidence that turns "we got to it" into a timeline you can actually show.

What should every maintenance record include?

Capture enough that a stranger could read one entry and understand the whole story.

• Date and time reported. The clock starts when the tenant tells you, so record it precisely.
• Unit and tenant. Which address, which unit, who reported it, and how to reach them back.
• Plain description. What is broken, in the tenant's words plus your note.
• Priority. A no-heat call in January is not a squeaky hinge. Flag urgency at intake.
• Assignment and dates. Who is handling it, when work was scheduled, and when it was completed.
• Attachments. Photos, invoices, and any messages, kept with the record so nothing lives in a separate inbox.

The point is a single, ordered timeline per issue. When that exists, "did we ever fix that?" stops being a question.

Where do most requests actually get lost?

They get lost at the front door, not the workbench. The gap is almost always intake.

Think about how a tenant reports a problem: a call during dinner, a text to a personal cell, an email to an address checked twice a week, a note left with a neighbour. Each channel is a place a request can quietly die. A missed call becomes a voicemail becomes a forgotten follow-up, and the tenant assumes you ignored them.

Those are round, hypothetical numbers, not client data. The lesson holds regardless of the exact figures: if half your requests arrive by phone and the phone is not reliably answered and logged, half your intake is exposed.

How can Iris capture repair calls into a clean record?

Iris answers the phone so a maintenance call never becomes a lost voicemail.

Iris is a done-for-you AI phone agent that answers your business calls 24 hours a day. When a tenant calls about a repair, Iris captures the unit, the issue, and the tenant's contact details, then hands your team a tidy summary instead of a missed call notification. That summary is the first line of your maintenance record, created at the moment the request came in.

• Always answered. Evenings, weekends, and holidays are exactly when the heat fails and the pipe bursts.
• Structured intake. Every call comes back as the same fields, so your log stays consistent.
• No dropped handoffs. The details reach your team the same way every time, not scattered across cells and inboxes.

Iris captures and routes the request. The repair itself, the scheduling, and the record-keeping still run on your process and your tools. To manage the tracking side end to end for Ontario rentals, our software PropertyHub is built for exactly that.

Frequently asked

Do I have to keep a record of maintenance requests in Ontario?

The Residential Tenancies Act does not spell out a specific format, but it does require landlords to keep a rental unit in a good state of repair. A clear, dated record of every request and the action you took is the practical way to show you met that duty if a dispute reaches the Landlord and Tenant Board.

What should a maintenance request record include?

At minimum: the date and time the tenant reported the issue, the unit and a plain description, the priority, who was assigned, key dates like when work was scheduled and completed, and any photos or invoices. That timeline is what turns a vague complaint into a defensible record.

Can a phone agent help me capture maintenance requests?

Yes. Iris answers repair calls 24/7, captures the unit, the issue, and the tenant's contact details, and passes a clean summary to your team so nothing gets lost between a voicemail and a sticky note. It captures the request; you and your tools handle the repair itself.