The winter of 2014 was no picnic. Chicago saw more than 67 inches of snow, parts of the Midwest had wind chills that clocked in at minus 60 degrees, and on one day in January, 90% of the lower 48 states experienced temperatures below freezing. The sheer number of storms and the extreme cold made words like polar vortex and ice apocalypse household terms.
In Washington, D.C., the joke going around among soccer mom circles is that the children will be in school until July in order to make up all the snow days. Funny, yes, but the stark reality is that this winter’s damage is much more tangible than that.
In such conditions, shoveling snow on one driveway is tough enough, but what about the field services companies who are responsible for property preservation on thousands of homes in the midst of extreme weather?
“It’s been a brutal, brutal winter,” said Joe Iafigliola, vice president of vendor management at Safeguard Properties. “We performed about 55,000 pushes worth of snow on driveways, sometimes multiple times on the same property.”
Phil Johnsen, CEO of Sentinel Field Services, agreed. “This winter was the worst winter in my memory from a property-preservation perspective.”
And shoveling driveways was just a small part of the overall challenge. Field services companies had to contend with freezing fuel lines, power outages and Level 3 snow emergencies, all while trying to maintain properties or even have them ready for showings.
“There’s snow, and then there’s cold,” Johnsen said. “Cold brings its own set of challenges.” The extended days of extreme temperatures in the Dakotas, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Nebraska wreaked havoc on older boiler systems, caused water main breaks, and even broke utility meters on houses.
Field services companies have a range of standards they have to meet, depending on who is looking at the property.
“Some cities are very quick to pull out the ticket book and fine companies who do not comply with their requirement for snow removal,” Johnsen said. “It has been a constant challenge in the East. For four weeks straight in Pennsylvania we had a major snow storm at least once a week, and at some points two or three storms in a week.”
And cities aren’t the only ones looking. “If there are REO properties, those need to be in a for-sale condition — brokers are taking purchasers there,” Iafigliola said. “The drives need to be clean, so whenever there is accumulation we issue work orders to go remove that snow.”
But therein lies one of the biggest challenges for these companies— knowing exactly where there is snow accumulation on properties that are spread from California to Maine. Or where there is rainfall heavy enough to postpone mowing a lawn. Or where an early freeze means someone needs to winterize pipes.
Enter big data innovation. Safeguard spent two years developing a system that integrates weather data with property condition information to give them real-time information on every property. They were able to deploy this platform — MapAlert — just in time for the extreme weather.
“This is the first season we’ve had MapAlert, and this winter has been a really good test run. MapAlert lets us actually see our properties on a map and understand visually how those are impacted; it’s not just on a spreadsheet list of 10,000 lines that’s hard to interpret,” Iafigliola said.
MapAlert combines external data on weather and storms with public geo-spatial mapping — longitude, latitude and altitude. But the system goes one step further, using the millions of data points it gets from Safeguard inspections and service calls to pinpoint exactly where the property is, and what it needs.
“The GPS data gets us close, but with our data we get it exactly right. When we layer on our data from the inspections and services then we know details — this property was winterized two months ago; this one had a roof repair or a plumbing repair,” Iafigliola explained.
Brice Bishop, president at Vectra Field Services, said his company integrates information from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) into its data platform.
“We take advantage of all the different weather tools out there to identify and predict the storms as they come through,” Brice said. “By using predictive analytics we can give our managers the tools they need to proactively manage our inventories and work around these issues.”
CONDITIONS ARE CONSTANTLY CHANGING
Field services requires flexibility and the ability to respond quickly to constantly changing conditions.
In January a Safeguard employee arrived at a Chicago multi-unit property to discover seven feet of water in the basement. Making things worse, the water temperature was about 33 degrees. Although Safeguard was only working on one of the units and the others were owner occupied, Safeguard pumped out the water and repaired the break, Iafigliola said.
“The client had a situation and we just resolved it. We make a difference to clients and really try to deliver on our mantra: customer service=resolution,” he said.
In another instance, one of Safeguard’s vendors in New Hampshire was winterizing a property near the Canadian border that could only be reached by snowmobile. The vendor had to ferry various supplies, including a generator, through the woods on the snowmobile. Because he worked into the evening, he had to rig up floodlights to the generator and operate them both while on the snowmobile to be able to navigate back through the woods to his car.
“Our vendors have done a fantastic job,” Iafigliola said. “People were getting hammered by the weather this winter.”
RECORD SNOWFALL
Although the South received severe weather in the form of ice and snow, Iafigliola said the Midwest and Northeast were the most challenging to service this winter.
“The weather in the South was terrible for the people there, but as far as servicing, it wasn’t as bad because it does warm up, and doesn’t last a month in Atlanta like it does in Chicago or Minneapolis.”
The Northeast saw record snowfall this winter. In the first two weeks of February, Allentown, Pa., recorded 35.2 inches of snow, which is more than they usually get during the entire winter. In that same time period Bridgeport, Conn., got a whopping 29.3 inches, up from their usual 4.2 inches. New York City had the most snow ever recorded for a January-February period with 4 feet, including a snowstorm in mid-February that dumped a record 27 inches of snow in Central Park.
“The volume of snow in the Northeast has been very unusual this winter,” Iafigliola said. “They usually don’t get it to this extent.”
Field services companies have contingency plans for severe events, like hurricanes or tornados, but the challenge of sustained periods of severe weather, like snowstorms, are more challenging than the once-a-season events.
When parts of Ohio and Indiana declared Level 3 snow emergencies in January, companies had to figure out how to do their jobs within those parameters. A Level 3 emergency bans all non-emergency vehicles from the road, pending arrest.
“In severe conditions our vendors are being pulled in many different directions, and it speaks to the need to have strong relationships with them, so that they prioritize your work,” Johnsen said.
And snow emergencies often mean power outages, with downed power lines adding to the safety hazard.
“The heavy snowfall in the Northeast and Midwest made it an especially difficult winter to meet SLAs and keep the work force out on the streets,” Bishop said.
“When you have very severe weather, it knocks out the vendor base as well,” Iafigliola said. “If there’s no power, they don’t have power either, so it’s a little more challenging.”
And it’s not a profession for the faint of heart.
One of Safeguard’s field quality control reps in Alaska routinely braves minus 50 degree weather to winterize property. His tip for working in that weather? “He told me that you never let the fuel in your car go below half a tank in the winter, because you might die if you get stuck in your car,” Iafigliola said.
