After-hours maintenance without being on call.
Your phone is the emergency line, so every drip, lockout, and dead outlet arrives as an emergency, usually at night. HomeRelay was built by a landlord who pays a property manager 10% and still ends up fielding the calls himself. The fix is not screening your tenant's number. It is having a system that takes the report, sorts real emergencies from everything else, and only wakes a human when a human is actually needed.
How do I stop being on call for tenant repairs?
Take your personal number out of the intake path and put triage in front of you; that is the whole design of HomeRelay's after-hours handling. When the intake channel is your cell, you are the triage. When the intake channel is a portal, the sorting happens before anything reaches you. With HomeRelay, the tenant scans a QR code and describes the issue with no app and no login, AI reads it and flags urgency and safety, and what happens next depends on what it actually is, not on what time your phone buzzed.
What actually counts as an after-hours emergency?
A real after-hours emergency threatens safety or the livability of the unit: a gas smell, active flooding, no heat in freezing weather, sparking electrical. Almost everything else keeps until morning, and HomeRelay triages on exactly that line. A dripping faucet at 11pm is a morning problem. A locked-out tenant is real for them but is not a habitability emergency; the useful answer is a locksmith's number, and HomeRelay lets you post your go-to locksmith on the tenant portal so tenants can call directly. For genuine danger, the order matters: if a tenant describes something dangerous like a gas smell, the AI tells them to call 911 first, and the request goes straight out to a vendor.
What happens to a non-emergency reported at 11pm?
With HomeRelay, a non-emergency reported at night is acknowledged immediately and queued, and dispatch fires at the start of the business day. The tenant gets a confirmation that the report is in and a plain answer on what happens next, which is most of what a tenant at 11pm actually wants. They are also told they can reply URGENT if the situation gets worse, which alerts you immediately. You can step in overnight if you see the ticket and want to act early. Otherwise it moves in the morning without you touching it.
What happens to a real emergency at 2am?
HomeRelay dispatches a real emergency immediately to the vendors you have marked as available after hours. Emergencies are never held for approval. If a vendor does not respond fast, HomeRelay widens to the next one. And if it hits a true dead end, nobody reachable, it does not fail quietly: you get woken through a ladder of text, call, email, and in-app notice, and the tenant gets a safety message telling them to call 911 if anyone is in danger. The system's job is to try everything before you, not instead of you.
Do my tenants get texts in the middle of the night?
No. HomeRelay holds non-emergency messages for normal waking hours instead of firing them at 3am. Nighttime sends are reserved for what cannot wait, like an active emergency or a direct reply to a tenant who just messaged. A maintenance system that texts like a spam robot burns the exact trust that makes tenants use it, so message timing is treated as part of the product, not an afterthought.
How do I set up after-hours coverage without hiring an answering service?
Build a small night bench once, and let the system use it: in HomeRelay you mark which of your vendors take after-hours work, and emergency dispatch draws from that pool. Practical version: ask each vendor you already trust one question, "do you take emergency calls, and what do you charge after hours?" You need honest answers more than you need yeses. Add a 24/7 locksmith for lockouts. HomeRelay tracks the core emergency trades, plumbing, electrical, HVAC, and locksmith, and nudges you when one of them has no after-hours coverage, so you find the hole in July, not during the January no-heat call.
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