AI for maintenance triage: how Darcy's agent works

How maintenance triage works today

Triage decides what happens to a repair request before anyone picks up a tool. A coordinator or property manager usually does it by hand:

1. Receive the request. It arrives by portal, text, email, or phone.

2. Get details. Staff ask for photos, the exact location, and when the problem started.

3. Classify it. Staff pick a category (plumbing, electrical, appliance, HVAC) and a trade.

4. Set urgency. Staff decide if it is an emergency, urgent, or routine.

5. Pick who does it. Staff choose an in-house technician or a vendor.

6. Schedule. Staff agree a visit window with the resident and arrange entry.

7. Get bids. For larger jobs, staff collect and compare quotes.

8. Create and track the work order until the job is closed and billed.

Urgency errors cost money. The EPA advises drying water-damaged areas and items within 24 to 48 hours to prevent mold growth, so a slow leak labeled "routine" can turn into a mold job. Voucher units add a deadline. HUD tells voucher tenants that when a unit fails inspection for a safety issue, repairs must be made within 24 hours. Other problems typically get 30 days.

What Darcy does at each step

When a resident sends photos, Darcy suggests the category, trade, and urgency before the request is filed. It recommends a vendor and a visit window, compares bids, and pages on-call staff for emergencies.

The maintenance module also holds preventive maintenance, inspections, unit turns, inventory, and keys. Those tools sit in the same module as the triage queue.

What your team still does

• The repair. Technicians and vendors do the work.

• Phone requests. Darcy's confirmed channels are email and text. Staff log phone requests.

• Entry notices. State rules on notice before entry vary. Your team owns them.

• Charges to residents. Deciding whether a resident caused the damage is a judgment call for a manager.

• Warranty and insurance claims. Staff decide when to file.

How review and approval work

Darcy starts by preparing work for your team to review. A coordinator opens the triage queue and sees each request with Darcy's suggested category, trade, urgency, vendor, and visit window. The coordinator accepts or changes each one.

As Darcy learns your policies and your team's decisions, you hand it more tasks to run on its own, one type of work at a time. A team might first accept Darcy's category and trade on its own, while vendor choice still needs a click. Emergency paging is a rule you set. Every action shows the records it used, such as the photos and the unit, so a manager can see why Darcy chose a trade.

Before you start

Triage is only as good as the rules and the vendor list behind it. Before Darcy prepares its first suggestions, do three things:

• Write your urgency rules. List what counts as an emergency at your properties, for example an active leak, no heat in cold weather, or no water to the unit.

• Update the vendor list. Record each vendor's trades and service area, so the vendor Darcy recommends can do the job.

• Set the on-call schedule. Darcy pages on-call staff for emergencies, so the schedule must name the right person every night.

What to measure

• Time from request to work order.

• Urgency changes after the visit. A request first marked routine and later marked urgent shows a triage miss.

• Repeat visits for the same problem within 30 days.

• Coordinator edits per request, by category.

• Emergency pages acknowledged within your target time.

For terms, see work order and preventive maintenance. For night and weekend requests, read AI for after-hours emergencies. To compare tools, see the best maintenance software for property managers. To watch Darcy triage requests from your portfolio, book a demo.