Capital improvement budgeting is an annual requirement. Sometimes finding the data from your expenditures last year to help you plan your budget can be a paperwork nightmare.
What are capital improvements? They are major repairs, replacements and upgrades, which require larger – and not always planned-for – outlays of time, effort and expense. Capital expenditures can include replacing appliances, kitchen cabinetry, mechanical systems, and even repositioning entire units.
Planning your capital improvement budget generally involves a number of tasks and a lot of digging, but what if you could have the data you need to make those decisions at your fingertips?
Inspect Smartly
When you perform inspections of the units, common areas, and mechanical systems in your properties, conduct a detailed inspection where you record as much detail as possible about the state & condition of each component. Rate the condition so you can make a better estimate of the remaining useful life for that component or appliance.
Track the Expected Lifespan
Keep track of not only the type and condition of fixtures and components in your rental properties but also their remaining useful lifespan. By tracking the expected lifespan and the replacement cost of each component you inspect, you are able to create an intelligent capital improvements budget based on when components are expected to exceed their useful lifespan .
The lifespan of the items in your apartments will vary depending upon a variety of factors including wear and tear, quality, environmental effects, obsolescence, competing properties, and property positioning goals. Failure to perform regular preventative maintenance on components can drastically reduce their lifespan.
Make your Budget Easily
When you conduct State and Condition Inspections with SuiteSpot Technology’s Mobile Inspection software, you are able to document the condition, lifespan, and efficiency of all components in a unit as well as common areas and mechanical systems. You can utilize our library of inspection templates that have been built upon years of experience and best industry practices to ensure you are gathering a complete complement of actionable data from your inspections.
Inspection data is then aggregated and tracked in our dashboards and inspection summarizer to provide insights to how repairs and improvements should be prioritized leading to more accurate budgets that will have a greater impact on the success of your properties.
Opportunities to Greenify Your Properties
We all want to save money wherever possible so if you can do that and make your property more enticing to the growing market of “green friendly” consumers there is an opportunity to win on both fronts.
Identifying components that can be replaced with more energy and water efficient models will reduce costs and allow you to market your property with a variety of water and energy efficient certifications and designations.
Your recurring costs decrease and you can sometimes often take advantage of government programs that offer rebates or tax credits.
Download the SuiteSpot brochure to learn more about our solution or request a demo.
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