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Maintenance request to vendor work order in one pass

Today

A tenant texts "water under the sink again" at 6:40pm. You retype it into an email to your plumber, forget the gate code and the dog, and the vendor calls you from the driveway the next morning.

With Claude

You paste the tenant message in and get four things back: an urgency call with the reason behind it, the questions you still need to ask, a calm reply to the tenant, and a work order the vendor can act on without phoning you.

The prompt

Paste this into claude.ai and replace anything in brackets.

You are helping me triage an incoming maintenance request for a rental property I manage.

Tenant message exactly as received: [paste the text, email, or portal message]
Property: [unit type, year built, and anything that matters here, for example "second floor unit above another tenant" or "shared water heater"]
Access details: [lockbox or gate handling, pets, parking, tenant work hours, who holds keys]
Vendor I plan to send: [trade and company, or "not chosen yet"]
My policies: [after hours threshold, what is tenant responsibility, my approval limit before I have to call the owner]

Give me four things.

1. Urgency call. Pick one: emergency now, same day, within 72 hours, or routine scheduling. Give the one sentence reason. If the report could involve habitability or safety, active water, no heat, no hot water, a gas smell, an electrical fault, sewage, or a lockout, say so at the top and tell me it needs a human decision immediately.

2. What is still unknown. List the questions I should ask the tenant before dispatching, ordered by how much each one changes the dispatch.

3. A reply to the tenant. Under 120 words, plain and calm. Confirm I received it, say what happens next and roughly when, tell them what to do in the meantime, and ask only the questions from item 2 that actually matter. Do not promise a specific arrival time and do not mention cost.

4. A work order for the vendor. Include the unit, access instructions, the reported symptom in the tenant's own words, your read on the likely scope, my approval limit, what to do if the real scope goes past it, and what I need documented: photos before and after, and the cause of failure.

Rules: do not state a diagnosis as fact. Say "likely" and give me the alternatives. Never tell the tenant who is financially responsible for the repair. Flag that question to me instead.

What to skip in real estate brokerages and property managers

  • Publishing any marketing copy without a Fair Housing review. Federal law bars discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, familial status, and disability, and many states and cities protect more classes than that. Claude does not know your local rules and it will write "perfect for a young family" if nothing stops it. No AI drafted listing, ad, flyer, email, or social post goes live until a human has read it against Fair Housing rules. Never ask Claude to describe the people in a neighborhood, rank areas by who lives there, or match a buyer to a location.
  • Legal notices to tenants. Notices to pay or quit, entry notices, lease violation notices, and anything that will end up in an eviction file carry content, timing, and delivery requirements that change by state, county, and city, and a defective notice can send you back to the start. Use the forms your attorney or your local apartment association approves, and verify the requirements for your jurisdiction. Claude can help you write the plain English message that accompanies a notice. It should not write the notice.
  • Records that identify people financially. Keep Social Security numbers, dates of birth, credit reports, bank statements, pay stubs, and full application packets out of the chat. Use first names or initials and strip the rest before you paste. Check your brokerage or management company policy first, because plenty of them have a rule about transaction files and AI tools already.

Want all 4 workflows for real estate brokerages and property managers in your inbox?

Every prompt on this page plus the rest, so you still have them on Monday. One email, then four short ones on making it stick. Unsubscribe any time.

Or answer four questions and Claude writes three workflows for your specific business rather than the industry generally.

Before you try it

More for real estate brokerages and property managers

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