Property Management Maintenance Company: Systemizing for a Competitive Advantage

 Today, we are talking about maintenance services and how you can turn it into a competitive advantage for your property management company. Here with us to answer our burning questions on the subject is an expert in this realm: Curt Fluegel, the CEO and founder of PM Toolbelt. About Curt Fluegel, the Founder of PMToolbelt Curt started in the industry as a property manager, mostly fixing and flipping property during the recession. Maintenance is his specialty and had been a core part of his business — until he lost a lot of money on it. To combat this, Curt systematized his business and created PM toolbelt. PM Toolbelt is a software platform that helps property management companies manage maintenance services. Below are Curt’s tips for property management owners that are considering on providing maintenance services: When Professional Property Managers Lose Money on Maintenance If any property management company provides maintenance services without thinking it through or having a process in place, they would most likely make more money by not providing it. A lot of companies have lost money this way, and it’s often due to lost receipts or not tracking expenses well enough. You may not realize you’re spending more on parts and labor than you are earning. You have to make sure your maintenance personnel are busy working and not spending extra time at Home Depot. Fixing homes and providing a good maintenance service is great, but to avoid losing money, you need to track better and charge more. Managing Your Time with a Property Management Company and a Maintenance Business As a CEO you shouldn’t spend any more time on this than you do on other tasks. The amount of time a CEO spends on a maintenance business depends on communication and scheduling. There are tools that can help with the actual oversight of routine maintenance. You can look at profitability by property or by tech from a CEO level; it’s no different than spending time on anything else. To control scheduling, getting the right systems is key. You can get away with a lot until your company grows too large. If you can alleviate the pain points like confirming that specific work has been done, or making sure maintenance coordinators, techs, and clients are all in the communication loop, then everything else can get pretty easy. For maximum convenience, your software should allow you to drag and drop to schedule a work order. That way, there’s not a lot of task management activities except on your bookkeeping side. But, if you don’t have a dedicated bookkeeper, you may have a bigger load. How a Maintenance Company Allows You to Take on Any Property Curt managed to pull in 50 percent of his revenue last year with his property maintenance company. A lot of factors accounted for that, especially the property choices that were made. Because he provides maintenance services, Curt’s company has the flexibility to work with both carefree easy-to-manage properties and properties that would make the maintenance company a lot of money. So that opened up what they could go after, increasing his revenue. Everyone wants the high rent/low maintenance properties in their portfolio. But, you’ll see other properties a little differently when you have a maintenance company to run. Adding an older home with repair needs to your portfolio means that the maintenance division will make a lot of money – money you wouldn’t make offering nothing beyond standard property management services. Curt took on a lot of properties from new property managers who felt overwhelmed with the amount of preventive maintenance their investments needed. You can get away with a different management cost when you can come in as an expert and explain why the ownerr&#...