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The person behind the product
Jimenez Julien
Founder, developer and support desk at LeakTicket. He publishes through MLJ, SASU, and he is the one who reads your email when a ticket does not behave.
Profiles
Why a repair ticket product, and why for owners this size
The first version of LeakTicket was a shared inbox rule and a folder of photos, built for a friend who owned nine units in two buildings and kept losing track of which tenant had reported what. He was not disorganized. He was doing intake by text message, by voicemail, by a note taped to his windshield, and by the neighbor who mentioned something in the parking lot. Every one of those channels worked, and none of them left a record. When a water heater finally failed on a Saturday, nobody could say whether it had been reported three weeks earlier.
That is the gap I set out to close. Owners with two to forty doors sit in a strange place in this trade. They are too small for the enterprise property management suites, which price by the door and assume a full time maintenance coordinator. They are too big for a notebook. Most of the tools aimed at them start from rent collection and treat maintenance as an afterthought bolted onto a ledger. I wanted the opposite: start at the moment something breaks, and make the record of that moment permanent.
I spent the better part of a year sitting with landlords in Ohio, Washington, Texas and upstate New York before I wrote the version that shipped. I rode along on turnovers. I watched a plumber try to work out which of two identical basement shutoffs served the unit he was standing under. I read three years of a landlord's text messages with her tenants, with her permission, and counted how many of them contained an address, a photograph, or a date. The answer was fewer than one in five, and that number is the reason the intake form asks for a photo before it asks for anything else.
What I learned about this trade is that owners are not lazy about documentation, they are interrupted. A repair report arrives while you are at your day job, driving, or eating dinner. Anything that asks you to open a laptop and type will lose to a text message every single time. So the product had to make the right record automatically, at the point of intake, from the person who is standing in front of the problem. The tenant is the one holding the camera. Give them one link, remove every step that could go wrong, and the file writes itself.
How I work with operators in this vertical is simple and slow on purpose. I run onboarding calls myself. I ask for two real unit numbers before the call and load them into a sandbox board so nobody has to imagine anything. When an owner asks for a feature, I ask which specific repair prompted the request, and I write the answer down with the date. About a third of what shipped in the last twelve months came from those notes: vendor certificate expiry reminders came from a landlord in Tacoma whose electrician let his coverage lapse, and the Spanish tenant form came from three separate owners in Texas asking within the same month.
What I am accountable for is narrow and clear. I am accountable for the product working on the day a tenant reports a flood, for the photos being where I said they would be, for the exports opening in the software your bookkeeper actually uses, and for answering support mail within one business day. I am accountable for the words on this site being true, including the numbers. I am not accountable for your lease terms, your local habitability code or your vendor's workmanship, and I will tell you so plainly rather than pretend otherwise.
Experience and expertise
- Eleven years building and running small business software, the last four of them entirely on tools for property operators.
- Field research with 47 owners and small managers across 14 states before the first paid account opened, and continuing quarterly since.
- Hands on background in web application development, data portability and document retention, which is where most of the deposit dispute work lives.
- Publication director at MLJ, SASU, the company that publishes LeakTicket and holds the contracts and the hosting relationships.
- Reads and answers every support message personally, including the ones that turn out to be a browser problem rather than a product problem.
How this product is built and maintained
LeakTicket ships small changes often rather than large ones rarely. Every change that touches tenant intake gets tested on a real phone on a weak connection before it goes out, because a form that works on office fiber and fails in a basement is a form that does not work. Photo storage is append only: once a file lands on a ticket, it cannot be quietly replaced, because the entire value of a repair record is that nobody can rewrite it after the fact.
Editorial standards on this site follow the same rule. Every figure quoted here comes from account data or from a named owner who agreed to be quoted, and the sample size is stated where a median is claimed. Testimonials are printed as they were written, with the person's real name, business and city, and each of them has approved the quote in writing. If a number changes, the page changes with it. If something breaks, I say what broke, when, and what I changed, rather than posting a note about routine maintenance.
Pricing is published in full on the home page, in US dollars, with no hidden per ticket charge and no annual lock in. Support runs Monday to Friday. Security and data handling practices are written out in the privacy policy rather than summarized in a badge.
Published articles
Everything below was researched, written and edited by hand for The Repair Log, the LeakTicket magazine for owners running two to forty rental units.
Contact the author
Write to jimenezjulien42@gmail.com with a question, a bug, a feature you need, or a request to see the product against your own unit numbers. If you would rather book time, use the request form on the home page and say what breaks most often in your buildings. Press and partnership questions reach the same address, and so do data access requests under the privacy policy.