Property Management CMMS: How to Choose the Right Software
A property management CMMS helps organise maintenance for buildings and their equipment. For a property manager or property investment company, the right choice depends above all on the work to be covered: carrying out maintenance with an in-house technical team, or overseeing contractors across a multi-site portfolio.
The right tool should connect equipment records, requests and maintenance reports while remaining suited to its users. The following criteria help distinguish a property manager’s needs from those of a maintenance contractor.
What is a CMMS in property management?
CMMS stands for computerised maintenance management system, known in French as GMAO. It is software designed to manage maintenance activities for assets and equipment.
The European maintenance terminology standard NF EN 13306 describes maintenance in terms of the technical, administrative and management activities throughout an asset’s life that keep it in, or restore it to, a condition in which it can perform its required function.
Maintenance involves two main types of activity:
Corrective maintenance: work carried out after a fault or malfunction has been reported, to restore equipment to working order.
Preventive maintenance: regular work to service equipment, meet safety requirements, avoid breakdowns and extend its useful life.
Which building systems and maintenance contractors do you need to track?
Property maintenance covers many types of equipment and requires different trades, including:
Passenger and goods lifts
Heating and air conditioning
Hot water production and distribution
Gates, pedestrian gates and barriers
Access control
Fire safety systems
This work is entrusted to service providers under maintenance contracts. Contractors use their own CMMS software, with a broad range of functions such as:
Property and equipment registers
Contracts linked to equipment
Technical team management
Work order management, including approval, scheduling, reporting and closure
Invoicing
Spare parts inventory
Dashboards
These systems can often also analyse repeated incidents to identify problems that should be addressed before a breakdown occurs. This is a proactive approach to maintenance.
The way maintenance services are organised differs between large commercial sites, smaller commercial buildings and residential properties.
Large commercial sites
On large sites, multi-technical maintenance providers often win responsibility for equipment maintenance through a tendering process. As part of their contract, they import the client’s equipment register into their own CMMS.
Clients — whether property managers, facility managers, corporate real estate teams or workplace services teams — may have access to the equipment register and maintenance records through a client portal. When changing provider, they should ensure that the new contract includes transfer of the equipment register and preserves their access to it.
Smaller commercial and residential sites
On smaller sites, equipment maintenance is handled by multiple contractors. In France, professional managing agents for jointly owned residential buildings may use different contractors for the same type of equipment across different buildings. The French context described here includes a building maintenance log, which records, among other information, contracts for the servicing and maintenance of shared equipment.
Managers may therefore lack centralised access to equipment registers across their portfolio. Contracts are identified in the accounting system, but the equipment and maintenance work associated with them are not necessarily recorded in the same way.
Property management CMMS: what should managers prioritise?
If contractors already perform maintenance using their own specialist systems, why would a property manager need a separate CMMS?
The manager has different needs. When maintenance is outsourced, managing a spare parts inventory or individual technicians’ schedules may be unnecessary. Some real estate departments nevertheless use a system that mirrors their contractors’ records to address five priorities.
1. Centralise and share information
Keep equipment information and maintenance contracts in one place. What equipment is installed? At which sites? Where are the maintenance reports? How can that information be found and shared quickly within the organisation, with clients and with service providers?
2. Plan and coordinate maintenance
When is the next maintenance visit due, and how often should the work take place? Managers need accurate information to prepare ahead, particularly when arranging access and welcoming the maintenance technician.
3. Keep a traceable maintenance history
Has the maintenance work actually been completed, and who carried it out? A recorded history helps managers answer these questions.
4. Support regulatory compliance
Even when contractors carry out the work, the property owner or their representative needs to check that maintenance has been completed properly. The aim is to extend equipment life, meet occupants’ expectations and fulfil applicable safety obligations. The regulatory references in this article concern the French property context.
5. Connect equipment records with reported incidents
Linking an internal ticketing system to equipment records helps managers identify recurring problems and determine which preventive and remedial actions should complement corrective work.
The CMMS products available on the market can cover these management needs without requiring every module, such as technician scheduling or invoicing. Managers can also consider newer digital tools that offer a narrower range of functions but are simpler to deploy and use.
FollowMe: ticketing and planned maintenance requests
FollowMe centralises corrective maintenance requests and offers a planned requests module connected to its ticketing system.
This module generates recurring requests linked to equipment and sends them to the people carrying out the work. It supports property managers’ monitoring needs alongside the technical organisation used by maintenance providers.
How to choose a CMMS for a multi-site property portfolio
Check how users navigate between buildings, link requests to equipment, give contractors access and retrieve the information needed for reporting. During a demonstration, test a real issue report, a recurring request and the process of finding a maintenance report.
If your own teams carry out maintenance, also assess spare parts management, technician management and scheduling. Check these requirements specifically: the presence of a ticketing module alone does not establish that they are covered.