Lessen Tenant Complaints with an Air Thermostat

One of the most common calls we receive from our residents is temperature. Today’s blog offers a simple resolve to lessen those complaints – regardless of whether the tenant or the landlord controls the thermostat.

What have I got in my hand over here? Is it a clock? Is it time to make the cookies? Nope. All it is is an air thermometer and why is it really important?

Because at the end of the day, we get tons of calls from our residents, saying “it’s freezing in my unit.”

What is the definition of freezing? Under thirty-two degrees. Now, at the end of the day in the state of Massachusetts, if the landlord controls the heat, we need to build a HAT B within a certain temperature during different parts of the day. Now it’s really important because when the tenants control their own thermostat, they don’t want to spend a lot of money so they’re going to set it at, say, sixty-five or sixty-nine, right? Seventy, maybe. And they’re going to hope that it gets to sixty-five, seventy degrees, and they expect it to be that exact temperature. At the end of the day, the thermostat is set in different areas of your building, so if your thermostat is set – say, in your kitchen or the living room by the kitchen, and you cook a lot you’re going to have a warmer thermostat; and that thermostat is going to shut down, even though the better ones on the other side of the apartment are a lot farther and a lot colder. 

So do you move your thermostat? At the end of the day, you need to tell them to be able to set that thermostat a little bit higher, so it can kick on, stay on longer, and warm up the rest of the house. At the end of the day, people will say “we’re freezing, I don’t want to pay my rent,” we walk right in every single one of my property managers, field managers carries this with them. And I can tell them, “hey, look. Sixty-five degrees in here. ”Oh it’s not freezing, actually.” There’s no request for loss of rent at that point. We take a picture of it while we’re in there as well. We’re going to be able to use our heat gun or our gun that allows us to be able to determine how hot those radiators get, and we do ask them to be able to crank it all the way up. Usually what I end up hearing is, “but my utilities are going to be higher.”; you have to guarantee that it’s sixty-five degrees. 

Now what we have to do is be able to make sure that you have heat that works – not every heating system is the most efficient, and we understand that. There might be drafty windows, we’ll work with our residents on that as well, but it is their responsibility, especially when it’s like five degrees up to determine that the thermostat is higher because sometimes the temperature difference between what they’re turning on the thermostat and what it reads in the room has a big swing, maybe ten, fifteen degrees sometimes because of that distance of where the thermostat is.

Our commitment

If you are looking for a proactive property manager that can help you deal with those types of no-heat complaints and be able to use small little tools such as an air thermostat and explain the whole process, please think of Green Ocean Property Management: where you get more than a property manager, you get peace of mind.