PlumbingBossPro Blog — Property Managers & Commercial

Apartment Building Plumbing: Units, Common Areas and One Building Record

A small apartment building puts a lot of plumbing behind one front door. There may be a shared boiler room or a row of water heaters in a utility closet, a backflow preventer on the main, a sump pump in the basement, a cleanout in the parking lot, and twelve or twenty-four units each with its own toilets, faucets and drains. Calls come from tenants, the on-site manager and the owner. Keeping it straight is mostly a record-keeping problem.

Buildings Are Not Rental Houses

The last guide, Plumbing for a Rental-Home Portfolio: Twenty Houses, One Customer, was about scattered single-family homes. An apartment building is the opposite: everything at one street address, stacked on top of itself. A leak in unit 302 can show up as a stain in 202. A slow drain on the second floor may be a problem in a shared stack.

That means you need two levels of information: what is true of the whole building, and what happened in each unit.

Two Ways to Set Up a Building

PlumbingBossPro keeps equipment, access notes and history on each address under a client. For an apartment building, there are two sensible setups, and the right one depends on how the manager works:

• One address for the building. Good for smaller buildings where most of your work is in shared systems. The equipment list holds the building's water heaters, backflow preventer, sump pump and main shut-off, each with a location note like “Utility room behind the laundry.” Unit calls go on the job with the unit number in the notes.
• One address per unit, plus one for the building. Good when each unit has its own water heater, or when the manager wants every unit's history kept separate. Enter “1180 Birch Ave Unit 3” as its own address and save that unit's heater on it.

Either way, every address stays under the one management client, and the monthly statement can list each line by its address. More on that choice is in Equipment Records Per Unit and Per Building for Commercial Plumbing Accounts.

What Goes in the Building Record

The building-level equipment is where your tech saves the most time. For each item you can store brand, model number, serial number, year installed, size, fuel or power, location and access notes:

• Water heaters, tank or tankless, gas or electric, with gallons and location.
• The backflow preventer on the main, with where it sits and how to reach it.
• Sump pump or sewage ejector in the basement.
• Main water shut-off and sewer cleanout, with notes like “Cleanout under the grate by space 14.”
• Any softener or whole-house filtration.

When a tech pulls the job up on the phone, all of that shows on the card. The tech who has never been to the building finds the riser room on the first try.

Access Through the Manager

Apartment access usually runs through an on-site manager or maintenance person. Access notes on the address carry the basics: “Check in with Dana in the office, unit 1,” “Mechanical room key on the manager's ring,” “Tenants need 24 hours notice, manager handles it.”

Two-way texting from your office to the manager handles the rest: confirming the day, asking which units are affected, and letting them know when the tech is wrapping up.

If the job means shutting off water to a stack or the whole building, the manager needs to know well ahead so tenants can be warned. Put that in the job notes and confirm it by text the day before, so nobody is surprised by a dry faucet halfway through a shower.

Recurring Work at the Building

Buildings have recurring plumbing work that is easy to forget until something goes wrong. Common examples are a yearly backflow test on the main, a yearly flush on the building's water heaters, and periodic drain line maintenance on stacks that tend to slow down.

PlumbingBossPro sets recurring visits by minimum days between visits. Each one comes due on the Waiting List map on its own. The office sees the building turn from not due to due now, and schedules it before the manager has to ask.

Proof for the Owner

The owner of an apartment building is usually not on site. Before-and-after photos on each job, plus an inspection checklist with readings like water pressure and water heater temperature, give the manager something to forward. The office can print the Plumbing Inspection Report from the job.

On the bill, a building account set to Monthly gets one statement covering every job that month, with each line labeled by address. If each unit is its own address, the owner sees exactly which units cost what.

Apartment buildings reward the plumber who knows them. For more on carrying commercial accounts, visit the commercial plumbing software page.