…why does maintenance seem expensive?

The last thing you want to think about when renting a new place is something going wrong. The reality is mechanics fail, appliances wear out and accidents happen. As property managers, we occasionally feel price sensitivity from our clients. This webpage serves as an educational piece on what goes into providing maintenance services and provides you with understanding of that side of our business.

Property management and maintenance must live in harmony and champion one another. They are inexorably tied in a dance, but it is easy from time to time to forget this. The heart of any property management business is it’s maintenance department, and residents and owners must understand the value of the maintenance operation.

WE HEAR VARIATIONS OF THESE THREE STATEMENTS FROM CLIENTS:

I can hire my person for $XX per hour. Your rates seem high.
I think this maintenance bill is way too expensive. It should be less.
I’m spending too much on maintenance. It is more than I planned.

Our value is not accomplishing the task at hand. It’s accomplishing any task you hand us. The value in our willingness and ability to take on anything is peace of mind for the client allowing them to be hands-off.

You don’t pay the technicians to do a task. You’re paying them that rate for the years of experience the technician has spent learning their craft so that they can accomplish the task in a few hours.

A cheap vendor that is slow, is not a cheap vendor. Experience is worth dollars per hour. Dedicated availability and a multi-faceted skillset are worth dollars per hour.

The truth is our maintenance team delivers a tall order and there are few if any other comprehensive options in the market. We do our service well, and to do so simply comes with a cost. Maintenance is a necessity service that we must delieve to the best of our ability. We are constantly improving as we find it critical to providing the best product.

Below are some of the things our maintenance logistic coordinators and technicians do for all our residents and clients that costs them $0 dollars. These items tend to get lost in the process.

Problem solving issues with residents over the phone vs. sending a technician.
Finding and flagging residents damage to charge it back and protect the owner.
Managing repeat work orders, or grouping work orders to execute efficiently.
Dealing with the difficult residents with hours of communication.
After hours calls, and messy emergencies with potentially having to line up temporary housing.
Sheer number of calls and WO’s we receive and field for an owner.

Maintenance requires a financial understanding of maintenance expenses on the front end. Being able to educate our clients is important to a successful relationship in managing an asset.

Housing that are 30+ years old (everything has gone through its initial life cycle and is at some stage of replacement) typically runs at 20% of rents for maintenance and capital improvements which is normal for this age of property. Surprisingly, most owners do not have a great financial understanding of that and it’s our team’s focus to educate our owners on preventative maintenance and plan for major expenses if necessary.

For the typical and average rental property we see 10-12% of rents being allocated to lawn care, weather caused damages, appliances, and routine maintenance and another 10% for larger capital improvements for those properties needing to stay competitive in the rental market.

CAPACITY TO ACT QUICKLY

Technician recruiting, training and management provide us the capacity and flexibility to meet the constantly varying demand. Staffing for demand is a daily task to deliver an appropriate response time for residents and owners. For example:

We need more people at turn time and less in the middle of the month.
We need more in the summer and less in the winter.

SKILL AND WILLINGNESS TO FIX ANYTHING

Collectively we have over 50 years of experience between a mix of technicians that combined can be scheduled strategically.

Each technician is a professional with 5 years or more of multi-trade experience.
We have a strategic mix of technicians, laborers, and carpenters to execute tasks.
We have project managers and logistic coordinators that maintain relationships with all our local vendors and service providers that we hire and trust.
We have qualified professionals that maintain our licensing certifications allowing us to be a licensed building contractor and can pull permits if needed.
The volume of work we provide our network of vendors garners us a priority status so that when weather hits the fan, they will choose our call over others.

EMERGENCY RESPONSE 24/7/365

We have a system to receive, coordinate, and respond to all requests day or night. This requires several systems:

Software
A skilled full-time coordinator
An after-hours call service (which is expensive)

STREAMLINED HANDS-OFF OWNER COMMUNICATION AND ACCOUNTING

This is a complete service where the client can be completely hands-off.

No receipts to manage, bills to pay, or accounting to add up
No vendors to hunt for or haggle with
No tenants to argue with

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

We measure our service with surveys to every resident to get constant feedback on how well we and our vendors are doing.

We monitor our surveys weekly and follow up with any residents who provides a low score so that we can address concerns and improve our process.
We maintain an average rating of 4+ out of 5. According to our residents, our technicians are friendly, courteous, and do a good job.