Lee Good, owner of Lighthouse Cove Property Management

Silverdale-based Lighthouse Cove Property Management Inc. opened its doors eight years ago with one residential property and has since grown to manage more than 200. Through the years, owner/broker Lee Good found one major headache: keeping track of all the maintenance requests while keeping everyone in the loop — the owners, the renters and the vendors.

After hours and hours of searching, Good said she couldn’t find anything to help her company. Instead, with a small team including her husband, Good helped create what they called “the missing link.” Earlier this year, the group founded a new company called Tracker Systems, Inc. When the company couldn’t find software to solve Good’s frustrations, they decided to create their own.

“Within our meetings, we thought there must be other people with the same challenges,” Good said. “The huge amount of communication it takes (for maintenance requests) is overwhelming. How do you track it or catalogue it?”

Called iMaintenance Solutions, the Web-based property management communication tool allows property management companies, owners, renters and vendors to carry out and track maintenance requests from beginning to completion. Property owners or renters can enter their requests online, receive status updates by e-mail, and see the requests through completion. Because the program is Web-based, it can be accessed anywhere in the world, Good said, which means property owners don’t have to worry about leaving for extended periods of time.

People who don’t use a property management company for their properties can also benefit. Tracker Systems will sell the software as a subscription service, then set up the original database, usually by converting an existing one from another property-management software. After the initial setup and data entry by Tracker Systems, the subscriber takes over the data entry and management of its information, while Tracker will continue to provide tech support.

Although most of the requests are sent via e-mail, Good said Lighthouse Cove still has to use the phone and fax sometime because not all vendors or property owners use e-mail. In that case, a staff member will enter that information into the program.

An added benefit of iMaintenance Solutions, Good said, is the fact that it creates a trail of all the communications, which could come in handy should a tenant try to take the owner to court.

Lighthouse Cove has used the software for a few months on a limited basis to work out the bugs, and in September Good was ready to take the promotion full swing. A team of marketers came on board, including her son, Darin Good, who will be promoting the company nationwide from Atlanta. Good said they hope to have it all up and running by the first week of November, with Silverdale-based Donobi finishing up the front-end interface and setting up hosting.

Tracker Systems will debut at several upcoming trade shows, including one in Seattle in December on trends for property managers. Good is confident that the market is out there — especially after talking with so many property owners who “store” their maintenance requests only in their memory, or write them on pieces of loose paper.

“For me, doing the work out there in the trenches, this is critical,” Good said. “Tracker is the ‘missing link’ that is missing no longer.”

Visit www.tracker-systems.com or call 360-415-0600 for more information.