Property Management Offices
Voice Assistant can answer your office line after hours in words you wrote, read exactly as written, so every tenant who rings can be given your emergency maintenance number. After the call it emails a summary of what the tenant said to the addresses you list, such as an on-call mailbox. It does not transfer the call, send a trade or decide what is urgent; whoever is on call reads the summary and decides.
Monday morning, after the first cold weekend of the year, there are fourteen messages on the office line. Most of them could have waited: a parking spot, a laundry card, somebody asking whether the rent cheque arrived. One could not. At ten past eleven on Saturday night a tenant on the sixth floor said the radiators had been cold since supper, and nobody heard it until you did, with your coffee. The emergency number is on the sign in the lobby and in her lease. She rang the office anyway, because that is the number saved in her phone. You carry the on-call phone yourself one week in three. You do not want it ringing at two in the morning about a parking spot, and you cannot have a no-heat call sitting in a voicemail box until Monday either.
Whatever the reason on a given night — it is the number saved in their phone, or the sign is eleven floors down — the call arrives on the office line. In a Toronto building of three or more dwelling units the emergency number is not optional: the city's property standards by-law requires the owner to keep a sign in the front lobby or entrance showing "the name and telephone number of the authorized person to contact in the case of an emergency on a twenty-four-hour basis", and to revise it within one week of any change. Across Ontario, the standard lease that most tenancy agreements signed on or after 30 April 2018 must use has a place in section 3 where the landlord can give contact information for emergencies or day-to-day communication. The wording you write for the phone works from the other end: whoever rings the office can be given that same number, in the words you chose.
Words you wrote, read word for word: the out-of-hours message for when you are closed, and the greeting. Put the emergency maintenance number in both. What you write is said the same way on every call, whoever is ringing and however upset they are, and a tenant who rings at noon about a burst pipe while you are at another building needs the number as much as one who rings at midnight. After that comes an ordinary conversation: a tenant can interrupt, talk over it, or start with the end of the story. Apart from your hours, all it has to draw on is the one box of plain writing you give it about your buildings — garbage day, how the laundry cards work, that parking complaints are handled the next working day. Your hours and that box are all it knows, so you can read every word of both before the line goes live. When the number is set up, a person from our side goes through that wording with you.
Once the tenant hangs up, a summary of what they rang about goes by email to each address on your list — an on-call mailbox, say, and the office inbox for the morning. It is an email, not a phone call, so whether it wakes anybody at two in the morning depends on how the duty phone's mail alerts are set. The summaries go to the list as it stands, not to whoever is on call this week: the assistant knows your hours and your box, nothing more, and follows no rota. So if the duty rotates between three of you, the arrangement that never needs the list changed is a single on-call mailbox, signed in on a duty phone that is handed over with the duty. If you switch it on, the tenant can also get a short text from it after the call.
No. It does not transfer calls, it does not ring a trade, and it does not weigh a dripping ceiling against a lockout. It takes what the tenant says, and everything after that is decided by whoever reads the summary. If what you need is something that sends a trade, or keeps ringing the on-call technician until somebody picks up, this is not it, and it is better you know that now than in February.
In Ontario, for most of the year, heat is a vital service. The Residential Tenancies Act, 2006 defines vital services as hot or cold water, fuel, electricity, gas and, for the part of the year the regulations set, heat. O. Reg. 516/06 sets that part as September 1 to June 15, with heat that keeps habitable space and the areas tenants normally use at 20 degrees Celsius or more, unless the tenant can regulate the temperature and the primary source of heat can hold 20. Section 21 of the Act says a landlord shall not withhold the reasonable supply of a vital service it is obliged to supply under the tenancy agreement, or deliberately interfere with it, and section 20 makes the landlord responsible for keeping the complex and its units in a good state of repair and fit for habitation. Neither section mentions the office phone, and we are not claiming an unanswered line breaks the Act. The point is narrower: a message about cold radiators left on a Saturday night in November concerns one of the things the Act names.
They can feed it, but they are the start of the record rather than the record. Toronto's apartment-building by-law, which covers purpose-built rentals of three or more storeys and ten or more units, requires a process for receiving and tracking tenant service requests: the date and time, where the problem is including the unit number, the problem as the tenant describes it, the tenant's name and contact details, and a way of telling which requests are urgent. Urgent means the loss of heat, hot or cold water, gas, electricity or fuel, or a breach of building security, suite security or the building envelope, and those need a response within 24 hours; anything else within seven days. Those records must be kept for at least 24 months. Each caller lands in your contact list with the call summary on their record. The assistant does not decide which requests are urgent and does not connect to a work-order or property-management system, so entering the request in your log, and what you did about it, is still a person's job — and we make no claim that any of this satisfies the by-law.
It has no tenant roll, so it takes the building and unit a caller gives and cannot check either. It does not know who is coming or when, because it has sent nobody, so a tenant asking for an arrival time gets none from it. And it gives no legal advice: a tenant who asks whether they can stop paying rent until the heat is fixed will get no answer on the law from it. Each of those is a reason a person still reads every summary. This page also describes only Ontario's tenancy rules and two Toronto by-laws; other provinces and cities set their own.
Fernwick Residential, its buildings and its tenants are made up, and no real firm or building is described. The firm manages four buildings in the east end of Toronto — three walk-ups of six to eight apartments and one eleven-storey tower with ninety-odd. The office closes at five. Before the office line was handed to the assistant, the property manager wrote the out-of-hours message: "You've reached Fernwick Residential, and the office is closed. If water is coming into your apartment, your heat is off, or a door won't lock, please hang up and call our emergency line, 416-555-0147, where a person is on call all night. For anything else, tell me your building, your unit number, what has happened and a number to reach you, and it will be passed on tonight." The daytime greeting gives the same emergency line, because a burst pipe does not wait for five o'clock. The box of plain writing lists the four addresses and the garbage and recycling days, and says that parking and noise complaints are dealt with by the office on the next working day. Summaries go by email to two addresses: an on-call mailbox, signed in on the duty phone that is handed over every Friday, and the office inbox. At ten past eleven on a Saturday in November, a tenant in the tower rings the office instead of the emergency line and stays on: water is dripping from her bathroom ceiling in unit 804. After she hangs up, the summary email arrives on the duty phone with her name, the unit, the drip and her number. The superintendent rings her back and goes up to knock on 904. At twenty to two the same phone buzzes again, for a car parked in somebody's spot, because every summary goes to every address on the list. On Monday the office enters the leak in its service-request log, with the time the email arrived and what the superintendent did, because a summary on a contact record is not the log. The assistant transferred nothing and sent nobody; the superintendent did the rest.
If the on-call mailbox is on the list and its alerts are on, yes. Every summary goes to every address listed, and the assistant does not hold back the minor ones. The alternative is to send summaries only to the office inbox and let urgent calls reach the person on call through the emergency number in your out-of-hours message; that is quieter, and it depends on tenants hanging up and dialling a second number. Which trade-off suits your buildings is yours to judge.
They will. As standard, the assistant replies in the language the caller uses, English or French; you can also set a line to speak French. Because the greeting and the out-of-hours message are said before the tenant has spoken, a bilingual building is better served by wording that gives the emergency number in both languages.
Recording is a switch, and whether it is on is your decision, as is whether tenants can leave a voicemail. Check how each is set before the line goes live. If calls are recorded, say so in the greeting and the out-of-hours message, since you write both.
It can answer the office number at any hour — while you are out showing a unit, at lunch, or after closing. You write what callers hear first — the greeting, and the out-of-hours message for when you are closed — and the goodbye.
The caller is added to the same contact list that visitors and web-form senders go into, with the call summary on their record, so the night's calls are on the tenants' own records in the morning. Where that information is processed and stored, and for how long, is set out on our privacy page.
Setting this up is our work, not a form you fill in. We go through your wording with you, and you can change any of it afterwards.
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