Urgent repair requests at Larkfield reach the on-call manager in 2 minutes

Before

Larkfield manages 620 rental units across the east side of Columbus. Tenants wrote to one office address about everything: rent questions, parking, a broken dishwasher, a burst pipe. Nine people watched it during office hours and nobody watched it at night.

The setup

Renee wrote a list of 14 words and phrases that mean an emergency, including leak, flooding, no heat, gas smell and locked out. A message with any of them skips the queue, goes to whoever is on call that week and pings their phone through Slack. Everything else gets an owner by building, so the same person answers the same tenants.

The maintenance request form on Larkfield's website feeds the same inbox, with the unit number as a field the rules can read.

What changed

From January to September 2026, 212 messages matched the emergency list. The median time until the on-call manager opened one was 2 minutes. Routine requests get a first reply in 38 minutes during office hours.

What didn't work

The first word list was too wide. “Hot” matched every complaint about the weather, and the on-call manager was pinged 30 times in one July weekend. Renee cut the list from 22 words to 14.