Emergency Contact List Maintenance

Pull the active user list from AppFolio, Buildium, or Yardi and reconcile against payroll. Include property managers, assistant managers, leasing managers, maintenance supervisors, and the regional manager. Departed staff still in the directory is the most common source of dead numbers in next year's emergency.

Each manager provides a personal cell plus one backup contact (spouse, neighbor) for the case where the cell is off. Test each line with a confirmation SMS this cycle — list maintenance is worthless if the numbers haven't been verified since last year.

Who calls whom when the on-call PM doesn't answer within 15 minutes. Default tree: on-call PM → assistant PM → regional manager → director of operations. Document the criteria for skipping levels (fire, flood, injury) so staff aren't waiting through the chain in a true emergency.

911 is universal, but capture each property's local non-emergency police line — that's the right number for noise complaints, welfare checks, lockouts, and standby during an eviction. Numbers are city-specific; a portfolio across three jurisdictions has three different non-emergency lines.

For each property, the nearest ER and a 24-hour urgent care within 5 miles. Useful for tenant injuries on premises, maintenance tech accidents, and resident welfare events. Include address — staff in a panic don't want to look it up.

Needed for sprinkler permits, alarm panel resets after a false trip, and post-incident inspections. The fire marshal also signs off on annual inspection certificates in jurisdictions like Boston ISD and many CA cities.

List account numbers per property and the meter ID — most providers' IVR asks for one or both before routing to a human. The gas-leak emergency line is always different from the billing line; mislabeling has cost properties hours during a real leak.

Include the city public works after-hours dispatch for main breaks at the curb — that's the city's responsibility, not the in-house plumber's. A burst service line at 2am is the wrong time to figure out which agency owns it.

Capture the IVR shortcut to skip directly to outage reporting (often press 2 then 1, varies by provider). Note whether the provider has a status page or text-alert subscription so staff aren't dialing for ETA updates.

Either the firm contracts a 24/7 dispatch service (Latchel, Lessen, EZRepair) that fields tenant calls and routes vendors, or it runs an in-house on-call rotation across its own techs. The contact-list strategy diverges from here.

Capture the dispatch service's account manager, escalation phone, and the SLA terms (response time, after-hours fee, what counts as a true emergency vs. next-business-day). When the dispatcher misroutes a flood call, the property manager needs to escalate fast — not log a support ticket.

At least two vendors per trade — plumber, electrician, HVAC, locksmith, board-up / restoration, pest, appliance repair. Include the 24/7 emergency line for each (the daytime office number is useless at midnight). Note preferred vs. backup so dispatch isn't deciding under pressure.

General liability + workers comp naming each property as additional insured. Flag any expiring within 90 days and request renewal now — a lapsed COI on a vendor working a 2am water-heater leak leaves the manager personally exposed. Upload the current certificates so they're attached to the contact list, not buried in email.

The county Office of Emergency Management coordinates evacuation orders, shelter activations, and post-disaster damage assessment. Capture the daytime line plus the 24-hour duty officer; in a hurricane, the public information line is jammed but the duty officer answers.

FEMA region varies by state — confirm the region servicing each property and capture the regional office line. The Red Cross local chapter handles displaced-tenant sheltering after a fire or flood; managers refer tenants here when the unit is uninhabitable.

Pull each property's flood-zone designation from the FEMA Flood Map Service Center. Coastal, Gulf, and Mississippi-basin properties typically sit in a Special Flood Hazard Area. Hurricane evacuation zones overlap but are determined by the state — Florida and Texas publish them separately from FEMA maps.

For exposed properties: address of the primary and secondary shelters (Red Cross or county-designated), the evacuation route the state has published, and the contraflow trigger if applicable. Upload the route map so leasing staff can hand it to tenants without relying on an in-the-moment search.

AppFolio, Buildium, Yardi, RealPage, Rent Manager — capture the firm's account number, support PIN, and the named escalation manager. When the rent roll won't load on the 1st of the month, the answer isn't a generic support queue.

Backup vendor's incident hotline, account ID, and the data restoration SLA. If the office server burns or ransomware hits, this is the call that determines whether the firm reopens in 24 hours or 24 days.

Confirm operations staff can sign in to the PM software, access the shared drive, and process rent from outside the office. A real test, not a checkbox — log in from a personal laptop on home wifi and process a sample workflow. The day the building is inaccessible is the wrong day to discover the VPN expired.

Email the PDF, post to the shared drive, and pin to the team Slack/Teams channel. Require a read-receipt or a thumbs-up from each operations staffer — distribution without confirmation means half the team never opens it.

Regional manager reviews the assembled list, signs off, and sets the next annual review date. Archive the prior year's version for audit and continuity — the year-over-year diff often surfaces departed vendors and rotated agency contacts that the live list missed.