Maintenance Technician

You keep one apartment community working, and you are trusted to go inside people's homes. Both of those are the job.

• Reports to:
  
  Asset Protection & Resident Experience Manager
• Direct reports:
  None. You run the work and direct contractors, but nobody reports to you
• Community size:
  About 300 homes
• Location:
  
  Various Locations, Texas. On site
• Living on site:
  This role comes with a subsidized apartment at the community and living there is a condition of the role. Terms are set out in a separate occupancy agreement, not a resident lease.
• On call:
  You carry the community's emergency phone

• Maintenance Tech I: $35,000 – $45,000
• Maintenance Tech II: $45,000 – $60,000
• Senior Maintenance Tech: $60,000 – $75,000

Plus the subsidized apartment and on-call standby pay.

You are the person who keeps one apartment community running. Repairs, preventive maintenance, getting empty homes ready for the next resident, and managing the contractors who do the work you do not do yourself.

You also live at the community and carry the emergency phone, so when something serious happens at night you are already here.

The part of this job people underestimate is the resident side. You are one of three people a resident ever meets, and the only one who goes into their home. How you behave in there does more for whether they stay than almost anything else we do.

The Company's five standards are what we hire for. In this job they mostly mean: show up when you said you would, write down what you actually did, and treat every home like it belongs to someone you know. You are not back-of-house here. We treat maintenance as part of the resident's experience, not as a cost line, and we will back you to do the job properly rather than quickly.

This comes first because it matters most. A resident is letting you into the place where they sleep, often when they are not there. Nothing else we do asks that much of them.

• Give proper notice of entry every time, in the form the lease and the law require. Permission last month is not permission today.
• Knock, say clearly who you are, and wait. Say it again inside if someone is home.
• Work clean. Drop cloths, shoe covers, tools on your mat and not on their furniture. Leave the place cleaner than you found it.
• What you see inside a home stays there. It is not a story for the office, another resident or a contractor.
• Leave a note every visit saying in plain words what you did. Coming home to a fixed problem and no explanation is half an experience.
• Be careful and kind around children, older residents, people who are unwell, and pets. You adjust to them, not the other way around.
• If a situation does not feel right, for you or for them, stop, step out and call your manager. Nobody will ever criticize you for that.
• Respond to everyone's request the same way. Fair housing applies to maintenance just as much as it applies to leasing.

Upfrnt runs the community. The building still belongs to its owner, and so do the big-ticket items: roofs, structure, slabs, main lines, major systems at the end of their life. Upfrnt does not pay for those. Your instinct will be to just get it fixed, and for most things that is exactly right — but not for these.

• Identify where the line is and raise the right work order for the owner's approval prior to work execution. Most of what you touch is an ordinary repair and is simply yours to do. Some of it is not.
• When you hit the line, write it up properly: what you found, what condition it is in, what you expect to happen and when. Photos and readings, not impressions. Your write-up is what the owner's decision gets made on.
• Tell your manager the same day. A major system…