One of the best jobs I had as a kid was mowing lawns. As a perfectionist, seeing the product of my work in a perfectly manicured lawn was very gratifying. Now that I am in the business of property management, I find that I am naturally critical of landscape maintenance vendors and always looking for the product that “pops” – perfect turf, beautiful flowers, clean edges, well trimmed shrubs, etc.
These convictions resulted in the creation of our vendor scorecard system. Simply stated, we grade our vendors on 26 components of quality landscape maintenance. Each of these components receives a letter grade, and then all 26 grades result in an overall vendor performance grade.
We decided on an electronic scorecard system (see photo below) for couple of reasons. First, it allows our managers and quality assurance staff to complete the scorecard on their smartphones and immediately transmit the results to www.landarc.com. Next, we log all of the historical results in our database and transmit the latest results directly to the vendor. This is important because the vendor contract stipulates that a grade of C or below automatically places them on probation with the potential for replacement without further notice. Finally, we make the results available to board and committee members who take an interest in their grounds maintenance and show the average grade on our monthly dashboard report.
This may seem like a lot of work – and it is – but the appearance of your community is a reflection certain standards that ultimately affect perception, which in turn impacts realities like property value. So set high standards for your community and demand that vendors meet them. This will set your community apart and reassure owners that their board is adding real value to their community.
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