Turns a vague repair report into a work order a contractor can act on, capturing the location, the symptom, the access arrangement and the photographs before anybody is dispatched.
An AI agent for work order intake handles the moment a repair is first reported: it asks the questions that determine which trade is needed and how urgent the job is, pins down exactly which property and which part of it, collects photographs, records how the contractor will get in, and writes a work order that can be dispatched without a follow-up call. Maintenance coordination fails at the front door more often than anywhere else. A report arrives as a voicemail saying the boiler is broken, and that sentence is compatible with a reset button, a failed part and a leak coming through a ceiling. Everything downstream — the trade you send, the urgency you assign, the quote you can get — depends on information nobody collected while the tenant was on the phone.
Asks the questions the contractor will otherwise ask you.
Identifies the exact property, unit and location within it
Asks symptom questions specific to the system being reported
Collects photographs and, where useful, a short video
Records access arrangements, keys, pets and parking
Assigns a trade and an urgency using your own rules
Escalates anything with a safety dimension immediately
A work order raised with half the information does not fail immediately. It fails three days later, when a contractor arrives at a property he cannot get into, for a fault that turns out to need a different trade, and charges for the visit anyway. The coordinator then re-opens a job that was supposed to be closed, and the tenant experiences a week of nothing happening. All of that is set in motion by an intake conversation that took ninety seconds and asked four questions instead of nine. Intake is also the only point where the person who can actually see the problem is available to answer, which is why recovering the missing detail later is so much more expensive than collecting it now.
A three-step flow from first report to dispatchable job.
The agent identifies the tenancy, the property and the specific room or system, so the job is never attached to an address alone.
It runs the question set for that system — what it is doing, since when, whether it is worsening — and asks for photographs where they settle the matter.
It applies your trade and urgency rules, records access, and writes a complete work order. Anything touching safety goes to a person straight away.
A Thursday-evening report of a leak in a first-floor flat.
Scenario: an office was raising work orders from voicemails and averaging two follow-up calls per job before a contractor could attend. A tenant messages on a Thursday evening to say there is water coming through her kitchen ceiling. The agent establishes the flat and that the kitchen sits below another unit, asks whether the water is dripping or running and whether it is clean or discolored, and requests a photograph. The picture shows an active drip and a stain spreading across two ceiling tiles. It asks whether she can turn off her own stopcock, records that she works until six and that the key safe code is on file, and flags that the source is likely in the flat above. That last point is the one a voicemail would have lost. The coordinator opens the job the next morning with a plumber assigned, both flats identified, and an access window already agreed rather than a note saying a tenant rang about a leak.
Anybody who has to turn somebody else's description into a job.
Most of the day is spent recovering detail that was available at intake.
Incomplete work orders come back to you as complaints from both sides.
Communal faults need to be logged against the building, not one reporter.
Repair response targets are missed on rework far more than on capacity.
Volume makes any per-job inefficiency compound across hundreds of units.
An incomplete order returns to you as a second visit and a complaint.
Takes the report, captures the evidence, writes the job.
Runs the intake conversation and receives photographs from the tenant.
Takes reports by phone and asks the same questions a form would.
Holds the work order, the property record and the access details.
Stores the photographs and video filed against the job.
Receives reports by email and issues the completed order to the contractor.
Escalates safety issues and anything the rules cannot classify.
The reports that are useless until somebody asks a second question.
Questions about getting a job right before it is dispatched.
An AI agent for work order intake handles the moment a repair is first reported: it asks the questions that determine which trade is needed and how urgent the job is, pins down the exact location, collects photographs, records access, and writes a work order that can be dispatched without a follow-up call.
It applies your rules, which is different. The categories and what qualifies for each should be written by your office, because urgency in property management carries legal response times. The value is that the rules get applied consistently rather than according to who took the call.
Those leave the intake flow immediately and go to whoever is on call. Anything involving gas, electrics, flooding, security or a vulnerable resident should be defined as an escalation rule rather than left to the agent to weigh up, and the intake questions should be short enough not to delay it.
Most will, when asked in the moment and told why. The request has to arrive during the conversation rather than as a follow-up email an hour later, which is most of the reason offices that ask by email get so few. A photograph of a leak often settles the trade question outright.
It can propose one from the symptom answers and your mapping, and that is right most of the time. Ambiguous cases — a leak that could be plumbing or roofing — should be flagged rather than guessed, because a wrong trade costs a wasted visit and a delay a tenant will remember.
By logging them against the building rather than the reporting tenancy, and by checking whether an open job already covers the same fault. Six residents reporting one broken stairwell light should produce one work order, not six, and that deduplication is worth more than it sounds.
Contractor capacity. If your trades are booked three weeks out, better work orders will not make them attend sooner — they will simply mean the delay is the only problem left, instead of the delay plus two wasted visits and a job that was logged against the wrong flat.
Turns a vague repair report into a work order a contractor can act on, capturing the location, the symptom, the access arrangement and the photographs before anybody is dispatched.