How Anthony Pepe cut Monday maintenance from 55% of the day to 11%

The numbers

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5,000 emails, three channels and no system

Anthony Pepe is growing fast. It made acquisitions last year and two years before that, and another is due to complete this year.

Charlotte O'Connor joined earlier this year as Head of Property Management, with 11 years in residential property management. Her brief: get the business ready for the Renters' Rights Act, keep compliance watertight, and protect the personal service that drives its growth.

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"It's not about the money, it's not about the numbers and the metrics. That all takes care of itself if you get the service element right."

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Maintenance was working against that. Tenants reported maintenance by phone, by email, walking into the office, or their previous maintenance system that didn’t get the team enough information. No photos. Just "a bit of word vomit" the team had to piece together before relaying it to the landlord, many of them overseas. Every quote meant another round of calls between landlord, contractor and tenant.

Their CRM, Reapit, could only track work orders, and their previous maintenance system had poor training and onboarding, which meant they could never get it implemented. The problems remained. Repairs waiting on landlord approval, or handled by a landlord's own contractor, lived in personal diary reminders. Miss one reminder on a busy Monday and the job disappeared.

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"Worse than duplicating, you would miss things... I've got no overview. I've got no data to be able to see and manage our performance."

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Nothing had gone badly wrong yet. But nothing would have stopped it.

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"We didn't have a defence mechanism or any layer of protection to prevent those sorts of things from happening."

The Tuesday that ended it

Charlotte remembers the exact day: the Tuesday after the May bank holiday.

The out-of-hours service only handles emergencies, and tenants don't always agree on what counts. "A fence fallen down, on paper, is not an emergency, but if you've got a dog, it is." So three days of repairs landed at once.

The phone rang continuously. Property managers were talking tenants through their fuse boxes. The shared property management inbox passed 5,000 emails. No compliance follow-ups got done. No inspections happened.

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"People were refreshed and revitalised after a nice long weekend, and within an hour they were flat as pancakes. I just looked around and thought, this is mental."

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The next bank holiday was in August. She set herself a deadline: something had to be in place before then. "Never again am I doing that."

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Monday maintenance: from 65% of the day to 11%

Monday mornings, rebuilt. On a typical Monday, maintenance used to eat 5 to 6 hours of a 9-hour day, up to two-thirds of it. Now it takes no more than an hour, and she calls that generous. Tenants report everything through Tapi over the weekend, so by Monday it's waiting in the portal, not ringing the phones.

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"That time that we used to spend on the phone with the tenant, then the landlord, then the contractor, that's gone. That's eliminated now. It's just click, click, click, click."

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An urgent repair now takes one call to the landlord, down from three or four.

Better information than the team could gather. Tenants report through Tapi with photos and guided questions. At one of the owner's properties, Tapi's conversation with the tenant flagged the issue as likely subsidence, not settlement cracks. Finding a surveyor and waiting for a report would have taken a good few days. Tapi did it in 30 seconds.

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"Nobody in that room is a qualified plumber, surveyor, electrician, and Tapi asks the right questions to get the right information."

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The reverse matters too. A light that won't turn on gets batted straight back to the tenant: change the bulb first. The team no longer filters through that.

‍Landlords get a record, not a phone call. The business owner's own portfolio used to mean typed-out emails and "have you got a photo?" replies. Now the tenant's report, photos included, goes straight to him for a quick approval. "It's quicker for him. It's quicker for me."

‍Reapit stays the record. The team runs every maintenance job in Tapi, and Tapi syncs the key details to ensure nothing gets entered twice.

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"Sending a work order through Tapi is a million times quicker and easier doing it than any other system"

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Management can finally see the full picture

Before, Charlotte could see open works orders and nothing else. By her estimate, that was about half the real workload. Setting KPIs on half a picture wasn't fair, so she didn't.

Now she sees every open repair, whatever its status, how long it's been open, and when someone last touched it. A job left for 10 days stands out straight away. She can see which contractors turn jobs around fastest and which property managers perform best.

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"I wasn't targeting them or tracking it because it wasn't fair... whereas now I've got the full picture."

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The team clears new tenant requests every day. She checks the queue three or four times a day, and 95% of the time it's empty.

Cover without the chaos. With a colleague on leave, she covers that property manager's maintenance by filtering on her name. Half an hour a day, if that. It used to be a full-time job on its own.

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Capacity for growth

The hours saved go back into the work that grows the business: routine inspections, rent reviews and portfolio reviews. Before, those were things the team "could perhaps only give 80% to".

Tapi has also become part of the pitch. At market appraisals against agents still running maintenance manually, it shows landlords what they get.

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"One of our unique selling points, I guess, that sets us apart from our competitors is Tapi."

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Her advice to any agency that thinks its current setup is fine?

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"You don't realise how bad it is until you see how good the alternative is. A day in the life of a property manager at Anthony Pepe is now completely different. It's far more customer-focused, it's far more varied."

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Asked to sum up Tapi in one word, she didn't hesitate. "Proactive."