Six landlord prospects, no price I believe in yet

What fills four to six hours a month for a fifteen unit landlord? In my head the rent comes in and the mortgage goes out and that's twelve transactions. I've never owned a rental, so I'm genuinely asking.

ember, it's the tail. Twelve clean transactions plus forty messy ones.

lantern, the document matters more than the price. Write an engagement letter with a scope exhibit that lists what's included by name, an hourly out of scope rate, and a monthly transaction ceiling above which the tier resets. Put in a client responsibilities clause: statements delivered by the 5th, receipts for anything over your capitalization threshold, an answer to your questions within some number of days. Without that you'll be chasing three of these six every month for free.

Also settle who owns the QuickBooks subscription. If it's in your account, you're holding their books hostage on the day they leave, and that day gets ugly. Client owns the subscription, you get accountant access. Having a lawyer look at the letter once is money well spent, and you only pay it once.

I priced this out as a buyer six months ago and got quoted $500 and $650 a month for eight units in one LLC by two different firms in a mid sized metro. Neither of them said the words real estate once during the call. Your $350 for fifteen units with a class level P&L per property is well under what I saw.

The question I'd want answered before I paid you anything: what stops me from turning on the bank rules myself and getting 85 percent of this? I'm not being rude, I'd genuinely like to hear the answer, because it's the objection you're going to get in every sales conversation.

compass, nothing stops you, and for some of us that's the right answer. My books are land parcels and a tax bill. Maybe forty transactions a year. I'd never pay $350 a month and lantern shouldn't want me.

Which is really the point. Six prospects from one meetup are not one market. The person with fifteen doors and a turnover problem and the person with three paid off lots need different things, and pricing one package for both is how you end up at $70 an hour.

The hours go where the renovations are. Draw schedules, retainage, deposits to suppliers that sit for six weeks, a $40,000 project invoiced in eleven pieces by four vendors, and someone has to decide which of those pieces sit in construction in progress and which are period expenses. That's judgment and it's slow, and it's the opposite of what a bank rule does.

Price active rehab clients separately or you'll subsidize them out of the passive landlords. I'd put a project accounting add-on on the sheet with its own number.

What breaks first at six clients is your close calendar, not your pricing. Every one of them wants their statements in the same first ten days of the month, and half of them will be late sending you the credit card statement. Commit to a delivery date measured from when you have complete records, never from the calendar, and write that in the letter warrant described.

On CFO-lite, I'd buy something like it at maybe eight or nine doors, and what I'd be buying is a person who tells me which unit is bleeding before I notice on my own. I wouldn't buy a variance report against a budget I never built. Make the first quarter of that tier about building the budget with them.

Do these prospects ask about credentials? I've wondered whether a QuickBooks ProAdvisor badge or a bookkeeping certification actually moves anyone, or whether it's all referral and a demo of the property level P&L.

plumb, in five years exactly one client has asked me about a certification, and they asked after they'd already said yes.

lantern, two things from doing this. Per door pricing invites an argument every single time, because a duplex where one side is vacant, a short term unit, and a house being rehabbed are all one door and three very different workloads. I moved to tiers by monthly transaction count years ago and the arguments stopped. Bands of 0 to 75, 76 to 200, 201 to 400, priced per entity, with the entity count as its own multiplier.

Second, put an annual price adjustment clause in the letter now. Everyone who skips that spends year four carrying clients at year one rates, and then raising a long standing client's fee by 30 percent at once costs you the relationship. Small and scheduled beats big and surprising.

Your $70 an hour is going to be more like $95 by month six on the same clients, because setup is where the time goes and setup is once.

Charge properly for the cleanup. $75 an hour is cheap for untangling somebody's two year mess, and the cleanup is also how you find out whether you want the monthly client at all.