Every property manager has the same contractor problem: the good ones are busy and will not do admin. Ask a plumber to install an app, register, verify an email address and learn a portal, and you will get the work done and the update by text message anyway. The question is how much of the job a contractor will really do inside your system.
The friction in a contractor app
- Install and sign-up. Before the first job there is already a task.
- Another password. Contractors work for many agents. Each has its own portal.
- Drop-off. Anyone who skips the app falls back to phone and email, and the record has holes.
What a job link changes
A job link is a secure web address for one job. The contractor taps it from a text or email and sees the fault as reported, the tenant's photos and the history so far. When the work is done they add their own photos and upload the invoice with the figure. No app, no account, no password. The link is scoped to that job, expires after 30 days, and is stored only as a hash on our side.
What it does to your records
The contractor's photos and invoice land on the job itself, ready for a named member of your team to approve, instead of arriving in an inbox to be matched by hand. And every use of the link, successful or not, is recorded in the job's history. That is the evidence trail: who saw what, and when.
When an app is still the right answer
If you run a large in-house maintenance team that works all day inside one system, a dedicated app can make sense. For independent agents who use a changing pool of local tradespeople, the lowest-friction route usually wins. Read more on contractor job links, or on how the evidence is kept: the repair audit trail.