Disaster Recovery Plan Checklist

Run every address through the FEMA Flood Map Service Center and record the zone (X, AE, VE, etc.). Zones AE and VE require flood insurance under the NFIP — and standard hazard policies exclude flood damage. Don't rely on the lender's flood determination from origination; zones get re-mapped.

Build a one-page hazard matrix per property: hurricane, wildfire, earthquake, tornado, winter storm, civil unrest. Use NOAA, USGS, and Cal Fire FHSZ maps as the basis. Coastal Florida and Texas Gulf assets need named-storm deductible exposure called out separately from the standard wind deductible.

Pull the master schedule of insurance from the broker. For each property capture the carrier, building limit, ordinance/law sublimit, named-storm deductible (often a percentage of TIV, not a dollar figure), and business-income coverage. Owners on the receiving end of a 5% wind deductible after a hurricane are often surprised — surface this proactively in the owner brief.

Confirm an active NFIP or private-flood policy on every SFHA property. NFIP policies have a 30-day waiting period before new coverage takes effect — do not let a policy lapse during hurricane season. Capture the policy number, expiration date, and elevation certificate location for each unit.

Export the active tenant list from AppFolio / Buildium / Yardi and verify mobile numbers and email addresses are current. Many tenants update phone numbers without telling the office; cross-check against the last 90 days of work-order communications. Note any tenants with disabilities or mobility needs requiring evacuation assistance.

Name a primary and backup spokesperson — typically the broker of record and the operations director. Field staff should not speak to news outlets or post property photos to social media after an incident. Document the spokesperson's cell, alternate cell, and personal email in case the office line is down.

Set up Twilio, RingCentral, or your PMS bulk-message tool with the tenant roster broken out by property. Test a non-emergency drill blast ("this is a test of our emergency system") so failed numbers surface before they matter. Confirm SMS opt-in language is in the lease addendum.

Pre-write the four templates you will need under stress: voluntary evacuation, mandatory evacuation, shelter-in-place, and post-event status update. Have legal counsel review for habitability and liability language. Storing them as drafts in your notification tool means the on-call manager isn't writing prose at 2am.

Common areas, hallways, laundry rooms, and elevator lobbies need posted egress diagrams with assembly-point locations. Multifamily buildings over a certain unit count are required by local fire code to post these — check the AHJ requirement. SFR portfolios should include a one-page evacuation insert in the welcome packet instead.

Document the on-call hierarchy: incident commander, maintenance lead, communications lead, accounting lead. Each role gets a written one-pager covering their first 24 hours of decisions. Rotate the on-call schedule across the team — do not concentrate institutional knowledge in one person.

Coordinate with the local fire marshal where required. For multifamily, run the drill during normal business hours and document tenant participation; for office buildings, schedule with major tenants well in advance. Capture the time-to-clear for each building as a baseline metric for the next drill.

AppFolio, Buildium, and Yardi run cloud backups by default — confirm the SLA in writing from the vendor and capture their DR contact. For Rent Manager or any on-prem deployment, verify the backup target, retention policy, and last successful backup timestamp.

Pull a CSV of active leases, deposit balances, and YTD ledgers and store an encrypted copy in an off-site location (a separate cloud account, not the same Google Workspace as the PMS login). If the PMS vendor goes down for a week during a regional outage, you still need to know who paid rent and who didn't.

An untested backup is not a backup. Pick a sample property and walk through restoring its tenant ledger, lease documents, and inspection photos from the backup source. Time the operation; an 8-hour restore tells you something different than a 30-minute restore.

Open a ticket with the PMS vendor's support team referencing the failed restore. Document the failure mode (corrupted file, missing attachments, expired credentials, etc.) and re-test once the vendor confirms the fix. Do not close out the planning cycle on a failed backup test.

Walk every roof before hurricane or winter storm season. Clear gutters, downspouts, and yard drains; loose flashing and clogged scuppers cause more interior water damage than the storm itself. Photograph the pre-event condition — adjusters use this to distinguish storm damage from prior wear.

Stage plywood, sandbags, tarps, generators, fuel cans, wet/dry vacs, and dehumidifiers at each property or a central depot. Big-box stores sell out within 48 hours of a named storm warning. Restock annually and confirm generators run; ungenerated test runs since last hurricane season are common.

Pre-contract with water mitigation, board-up, tree removal, and roofing vendors before the event. Servpro, BluSky, and Belfor all offer priority-response programs to clients with signed master service agreements. Walk-in customers wait two weeks for a crew after a regional event; contracted clients get one within 24-48 hours.

Pull every restoration, plumbing, electrical, and roofing vendor on the approved list and verify their general liability and workers comp certificates are current and name the property as additional insured. A lapsed COI on a roofer working in driving rain after a hurricane is a personal-liability problem.

Email each vendor with an expired or non-conforming COI and request a corrected certificate within 10 business days. If they don't comply, suspend them from the approved list until renewed. Update the COI tracker in the PMS or your vendor management tool with the new expiration.

Document where staff will work if the main office is uninhabitable: a regional sister office, a coworking space with a pre-existing membership, or fully remote. Confirm laptops, VPN access, and softphone setup work from outside the office network. A test work-from-home day each year surfaces the gaps.

Confirm two signers on the operating and trust accounts are reachable independently — single-signer setups break when that signer is in an evacuation. Pre-arrange a working capital line of credit; insurance proceeds typically take 30-90 days while restoration vendors expect deposits up front.

Send each owner a one-page summary of their property's hazard exposure, deductible structure, and recommended reserve balance. Owners with a 5% named-storm deductible on a $400K building need to know they are exposed for $20K out of pocket per event before insurance pays. Capture written acknowledgment in the owner file.

Meet the carrier's adjuster on site — do not let them inspect alone. Bring the pre-event roof photos and the original construction docs to dispute pre-existing-condition arguments. Photograph every damaged elevation, room interior, and damaged contents before any mitigation work starts.

Submit one claim per peril per property per policy — a hurricane claim and a flood claim ride on different policies and different deductibles. Track the claim number, adjuster name, and reserve amount on a single spreadsheet across the portfolio. State prompt-pay statutes start the clock at filing, not at inspection.

Tenants in uninhabitable units are entitled to relief under the warranty of habitability — usually rent abatement and sometimes alternate housing. Document the displacement period for each tenant; this drives both rent abatement and the loss-of-rents claim against the carrier. Communicate restoration timeline weekly to displaced tenants.

Run a structured debrief covering what worked, what failed, and what to change before the next event. Update the plan based on lessons learned — communication gaps, vendor response times, deductible surprises, staffing shortfalls. The plan that doesn't get updated after an event is the plan that fails the next one.