www.facilgo.com
FirstKey Homes Improves
Resident Experience and
Maintenance Eciency
with FacilGo
®
Case Study
Founded in 2015, FirstKey Homes is one of the
largest operators of single-family rental (SFR)
homes in North America. With headquarters in
Marietta, Georgia, FirstKey Homes operates
nearly 53,000 single-family rental homes across
29 desirable markets nationwide. FirstKey Homes
proudly serves the family of residents making their
homes their own and builds communities one
caring experience at a time.
To accomplish this, FirstKey Homes takes great
pride in being a best-in-class SFR company. It
continues to be an industry leader, delivering an
outstanding resident experience and nishing the
rst half of 2023 with a 4.6 out of a 5-star public
sentiment score. This performance – coupled
with its Better Business Bureau accreditation
and current A+ rating, high occupancy rates,
and solid renewal rates – afrms the company’s
dedication to lead with resident experience while
illustrating why people who prefer or need to rent
choose FirstKey Homes. A vital part of its resident
experience includes leveraging an approach that
combines the personal attention of over 1,000
caring professionals who serve prospective and
current residents with pride and passion and the
technology and support from a world-class service
provider.
Company Overview
FirstKey Homes
52,000+
Single-Family Rental Homes
29
Desirable Markets Nationwide
FirstKey Homes records hundreds of thousands maintenance requests per year across the West, Midwest,
and South/Southeast. With maintenance as a major touch point between FirstKey Homes and its residents,
the company set out to further enhance its processes and quality efforts to ensure an unparalleled resident
experience while improving efciency and reducing costs.
To this end, the FirstKey Homes maintenance leadership team developed some key objectives:
www.facilgo.com
Case Study: FirstKey Homes Improves Resident Experience and Maintenance Eciency with FacilGo
www.facilgo.com
It was obvious to FirstKey Homes that they needed to centralize and automate their distributed
maintenance operations with a software solution. Initially, FirstKey Homes used the maintenance module
that came with their Property Management System (PMS). While the PMS had a very broad and rich set
of capabilities across most functions, the maintenance team determined that they needed a purpose-built
software solution designed for distributed maintenance.
The Need
FirstKey Homes’ Maintenance Objectives
1. To fortify the delivery of a high-quality maintenance experience for residents with timely
work order closure and thorough communication, ideally closing work orders on the rst
visit.
2. To better track and analyze resident satisfaction along with overall maintenance costs with
quality data and dashboards.
3. To improve staff satisfaction by providing simpler scheduling, communication and
documentation via a mobile-enabled software solution.
4. To simplify the procurement process by enabling approved products and services to be
purchased from within a mobile application with a single click.
5. To reduce the intake of work orders by eliminating duplicate work orders and educating
residents so they might resolve some simple maintenance requests themselves.
6. To improve the accuracy and timeliness of insurance claims.
4.6 Stars
Resident Satisfaction
In First Haf Of 2023
FirstKey Homes went through a rigorous evaluation process and reviewed and tested six different
maintenance solutions in the market. They selected the FacilGo Maintenance Plus solution as their mobile-
enabled and cloud-based SaaS solution for the following reasons:
Case Study: FirstKey Homes Improves Resident Experience and Maintenance Eciency with FacilGo Case Study: FirstKey Homes Improves Resident Experience and Maintenance Eciency with FacilGo
www.facilgo.com
FirstKey Homes assigned a team of business analysts and IT staff to support the FacilGo integration,
deployment, and subsequent enhancements. FacilGo was deployed into production in September 2021 to
2 markets and then across all 29 markets by January 2022.
The FirstKey Homes team also developed the FirstKey Homes Maintenance System (FMS), a smart
resident portal running on top of FacilGo APIs.
FacilGo
®
Maintenance Plus and a New FirstKey Homes’ Resident Portal
The Solution
1. FacilGo Maintenance Plus was specically designed to centralize and automate
maintenance in the distributed environment faced by SFR and larger MF operators.
2. FacilGo was exible enough to map to FirstKey Homes’ innovative maintenance processes
versus requiring them to use pre-dened vendor processes.
3. FacilGo was an enterprise-grade, cloud-based solution architected to scale from hundreds
of homes securely and smoothly to tens of thousands of homes with its own enterprise
data warehouse and rich set of application programming interfaces (APIs).
4. The FacilGo platform tied together every transaction into a workow including work order
creation, scheduling, communication, procurement, routing, invoicing, vendor payments,
resident charge backs and more - eliminating virtually all manual steps and human errors in
the maintenance workow process.
5. FacilGo offered a mobile app for iOS- and Android-based smartphones. This enabled teams
to use the system and manage the entire work order process, including procurement, even
when poorly connected or completely disconnected versus solutions that only offered web
access.
6. The FacilGo Maintenance Plus mobile application was extended to service providers so
they could more efciently collaborate and communicate with FirstKey Homes staff on
completing and documenting the work performed at the job site.
17% Reduction
Maintenance Costs Reduced
by 17% in First Year
First and foremost, FirstKey Homes was able to
leverage FacilGo Maintenance Plus to enhance
and standardize its maintenance processes
across markets leading to an improved resident
experience.
With FacilGo’s workow-based system:
• Maintenance requests were tracked at every
step until closure, and communication between
staff and vendors was recorded with the
work order ensuring a full picture of every
maintenance request.
• Field technicians and vendors documented
maintenance issues, including photos, and
progressed work orders via the FacilGo smart
phone app, whether they were fully, partially or
not connected to the internet.
• With real-time status and a clear communication
history, work orders closed faster, and resident
satisfaction improved. For example, FirstKey
measures work orders open for greater than
30 days which is directly related to resident
satisfaction. The only work orders that now
remain open beyond 30 days are those that are
extremely complex and/or items that require
HOA or city inspections.
• Central teams could more easily schedule the
right staff member or vendor for a particular work
order and had a record of all communication.
With the mobile app, eld staff were empowered
to accept assignments and close work orders
while in the eld, reducing the amount of time
spent driving back and forth to a central location.
With FacilGo’s rich APIs and exible architecture:
• FacilGo integrated into FirstKey Homes property
management system (PMS) providing a
seamless ow of information between the two
systems.
• FirstKey Homes built and deployed the FMS
smart resident portal on top of FacilGo APIs,
ensuring a great resident experience, eliminating
most duplicate work orders, and providing
educational materials to their residents to help
them resolve simple maintenance requests on
their own.
With FacilGo’s mobile app, simpler scheduling
and rich dashboards:
• FirstKey Homes could see that the eld teams
were able to close more work orders on a given
day with less time spent on mundane tasks
and a reduction in unnecessary drive time.
This resulted in improved staff and resident
satisfaction along with lower overall maintenance
costs.
• When complex maintenance issues required
external vendors, FirstKey Homes leveraged
the FacilGo procurement functionality to ensure
consistent vendor quality at fair prices with the
ability to set NTE values and measure vendor
performance.
• The central maintenance team was able to
spend less time coordinating and triaging
schedules by leveraging FacilGo’s Smart
Scheduling so they could spend more time on
strategic initiatives.
The Results
www.facilgo.com
Case Study: FirstKey Homes Improves Resident Experience and Maintenance Eciency with FacilGo
“At FirstKey Homes, we strive to deliver great
service to our residents. FacilGo has allowed us to
improve our resident experience while achieving
a reduction in maintenance costs. Furthermore,
FacilGo’s ability to integrate exibly with our
processes and scale to support our nearly 53,000
homes has been critical to this mission.”
FirstKey Homes continues to be an industry
innovator and leader:
• Resident satisfaction is at an all-time high.
• Maintenance costs have been reduced by 17%
in the rst year (Q1 2022 to Q1 2023).
• Insurance claims are being led and tracked in a
highly accurate and timely manner.
While rolling out a centralized maintenance
software system and securing adoption by internal
staff and suppliers certainly requires time and
effort, FacilGo Maintenance Plus has delivered
measurable benets and a strong payback in
the rst year - with increased resident, staff, and
supplier satisfaction and improved NOI for the
business.
