Property Maintenance Vendors: How to Manage Them at Scale

What property maintenance vendors do for landlords

Vendors cover three broad kinds of work. Routine upkeep includes cleaning, landscaping and snow removal. Reactive repairs cover plumbing, electrical, HVAC and appliance failures. Larger projects cover renovations and unit turnovers. One property services company’s overview lists these same categories as the standard scope of a maintenance provider.

For landlords, the practical list is longer. Providers serving rental owners in Canada describe painting, drywall and flooring repairs, fixture and faucet replacement, caulking, minor carpentry, appliance installation and move-in or move-out preparation as common assignments. On the exterior side, the same source lists landscaping, snow removal, gutter cleaning, weatherproofing, deck and fence repairs and power washing.

Some work is not optional to outsource. In Toronto, building owners must use certified tradespeople where required by law for systems such as heating, ventilation, air conditioning and plumbing. Rules differ by province and municipality, so check the requirements where your buildings sit.

Finding and vetting vendors in Canada

Where to look

Most managers build rosters from referrals first. In Atlantic Canada, local landlord associations, property management groups and trade associations are common sources, and a small trial project is a low-risk way to see how a new contractor works. If you operate in Halifax, Moncton, Charlottetown or St. John’s, the local depth of trades can be thin, which makes a backup vendor for each trade worth having from the start.

What to check before the first job

Before a vendor touches a unit, confirm three things:

1. Trade licences where the work requires one.
2. General liability insurance. Canadian landlords should verify liability insurance and workers’ compensation coverage, such as WSIB in Ontario, because damage or an accident involving an uninsured contractor can become the landlord’s own financial problem.
3. Workers’ compensation status in the province where the work happens.

BC Housing’s guidance for housing providers goes further for larger or recurring work. It advises requesting a WorkSafeBC Letter of Good Standing and a CCDC 11 Contractor’s Qualification Statement. It also recommends three quotes for lower-value, one-time projects and service agreements with qualified suppliers for cyclical maintenance. That split is a useful rule for any portfolio: competitive quotes for one-off jobs, standing agreements for recurring ones. If you are weighing how to structure quotes on a bigger renovation, an article on comparing design-build and design-bid shows how the delivery model changes what you ask contractors to price.

Treat the file as living. Insurance certificates and coverage letters expire, so set a renewal reminder per vendor rather than checking once.

Why coordination costs more than the repairs

A single repair involves more steps than most owners count. A tenant reports a problem, often by phone, email or a portal they do not like using. Someone asks follow-up questions to understand it. Someone decides whether it is urgent. Someone finds an available vendor, passes on access details, books a time, tells the tenant, confirms the visit happened and files the invoice. Each step is a handoff, and each handoff is a place for delay or error.

At 20 units that is manageable. At 500 or 2,000 units it becomes a staffing question: more units usually means more coordinators, more after-hours coverage and more phone time. Our piece on after-hours maintenance looks at the burnout side of that.

There is also a compliance dimension. Under Toronto’s RentSafeTO rules for covered apartment buildings, urgent requests involving electricity, gas, heat, water, security or the building exterior need a response within 24 hours, and non-urgent requests within seven days. The City’s handbook says each request record should capture date and time, location, nature, tenant name and contact details, urgency, and the response and action taken, with records kept for 24 months. These are Toronto requirements, not national ones, but they describe the record any well-run portfolio should be able to produce.

What a good vendor management process includes

A workable process has six parts, whatever tools you use:

1. Structured intake. Capture the unit, the problem, photos where possible and how urgent it is, in the same format every time.
2. Triage. Separate emergencies from routine issues, and separate issues a tenant can resolve safely (a tripped breaker, a reset button) from those that need a visit.
3. Assignment. Match the job to the right trade and the right vendor, with a backup when the first choice is unavailable.
4. Scheduling and access. Agree a time with the tenant and the vendor, and confirm both.
5. Follow-up. Confirm completion with the tenant, not just the vendor.
6. Records. Keep the full history of requests, vendors, costs and outcomes per property.

Coordination across a portfolio also benefits from simple habits. Industry guidance recommends centralizing vendor information, batching visits to nearby properties and building long-term vendor relationships that can bring priority service when something urgent breaks.

Tracking vendor performance and cost

Vendor accountability depends on having data. BC Housing’s procurement guidance says supplier performance should be monitored continuously against contract requirements, with unsatisfactory work handled through documented non-conformance notices. When you raise one, the supplier’s reply should identify the root cause, propose preventive action and give a timeline for resolution.

In practice, for each vendor track:

Cost records also matter at tax time. The Canada Revenue Agency lets landlords deduct labour and material costs for small maintenance and repairs from rental income, though not the value of your own work. Clean per-job invoices make that easier. Confirm treatment of specific expenses with your accountant. You can also estimate where your spending sits with our rental maintenance cost calculator.

How GoLando automates vendor coordination by text

GoLando is an AI-powered maintenance coordination platform for landlords and property managers. It handles the steps between a tenant’s problem and a completed repair, entirely by SMS. The setup is deliberately simple:

1. You add properties, tenants and your preferred contractors. Your vendors stay your vendors.
2. A tenant texts a maintenance issue. No app to download, no portal to learn and no phone call.
3. GoLando troubleshoots. It asks questions and guides simple fixes, which can avoid service calls that were never needed. See how this works in our troubleshooting guide.
4. GoLando detects emergencies. Urgent situations are identified in the conversation rather than waiting in a queue.
5. GoLando coordinates the vendor. It handles dispatch to the right vendor, scheduling, updates to the tenant and follow-up through to completion.
6. The dashboard records everything. Requests, vendor activity, property maintenance history, expenses and performance metrics sit in one place.

The tenant side is intentionally low-friction, and tenants and vendors never pay to use the platform.

Your vendors, or the GoLando Vendor Network

Most managers already have trades they trust, and GoLando works with them. Where it is available, the GoLando Vendor Network gives you optional access to additional approved providers, for example when your usual plumber is unavailable. Jobs distributed through the network carry a network fee of 5-10%, charged on those jobs. Work you send to your own vendors does not go through the network.

To be clear about what GoLando is not: it is not a vendor directory where you browse listings, and it is not a do-it-yourself workflow builder where your team designs automations from scratch. It runs the coordination for you, using the vendors and rules you set.

Alongside your property management software

GoLando does not replace your property management system. It automates the maintenance communication and coordination that those systems usually only track, and it integrates with Buildium. Your leasing, accounting and reporting workflows stay where they are. Our page for property management companies explains how teams put this alongside existing tools.

Scaling without adding coordinators

When requests arrive by text and the first conversation is handled automatically, coordinators spend time on exceptions rather than on every ticket. That is the operational point for portfolios of 100 to 5,000 or more units: the number of requests grows with units, but the manual work per request shrinks. Fewer unnecessary visits cut vendor invoices, after-hours calls become less disruptive, and a consistent record per job makes vendor reviews factual.

Results depend on your portfolio, your vendors and how your tenants use the service, so we do not promise a specific saving. What you can do is measure your own baseline now: calls per week, average days to completion and cost per work order. Then compare after a trial period.

Our perspective

We built GoLando because maintenance coordination is where property teams lose the most hours, and most of those hours are not skilled work. They are relaying messages: tenant to coordinator, coordinator to vendor, vendor back to tenant. Software that stores tickets does not remove that work. It only records it.

We also think vendors are best managed as relationships. Good tradespeople respond faster to managers who give clear scopes, accurate access details and prompt confirmation, and an automated system should make that consistency easier, not replace it. Your preferred contractors should stay at the centre, with network access as a backup rather than a mandate.

GoLando is Canadian-owned and operated, and Canada is our first market. That shapes how we think about provinces, winters, small-market trades and the way Canadian tenants actually text. The founding story is on our story page.

— Ryan

GoLando plans and pricing

GoLando is a subscription tiered by portfolio size, with prices in Canadian dollars. Published monthly prices are $39 for Starter, $69 for Pro, $149 for Pro+, $249 for Mogul and $449 for Scale, with Enterprise from $999 per month. Annual billing is $390, $690, $1,490, $2,490 and $4,490 for the first five plans respectively. Larger portfolios usually look at Scale or Enterprise. See the full pricing page for what each plan includes and to get started.

Start coordinating vendors by text

If your team spends its days relaying messages between tenants and trades, see how GoLando handles it at golando.ca.