Clean single fee or a full ancillary stack, which one actually holds 200 doors together

In my rural markets the flat per-door option is the only one that works, and nobody offers it. At $700 rents a 10% fee is $70 a month and no manager will get out of bed for that, so the ones who take the doors survive on the ancillary lines and the owners have no alternative to compare against. Shop A's model assumes rents high enough that a percentage fee funds real staff. Below about $900 that stops being true.

Owner side, and I'd pay the higher single fee. Not out of principle, I just want a statement I can read in four minutes and predict within about fifty dollars. The Shop B version means every month I'm doing arithmetic to work out what I actually paid, and every repair invoice makes me wonder whether it got shopped. Where Shop B would win me is if the coordination fee were disclosed as a dollar amount up front with a cap, because then it's just a fee.

Two terms worth defining for anyone reading this cold, because the whole disagreement runs on them.

Ancillary income means everything a management company earns beyond its base management fee. A resident benefit package, usually called an RBP, is a bundle sold to the tenant for a monthly amount, often including renters insurance compliance, filter delivery, on-time rent reporting to credit bureaus, and sometimes a small maintenance credit. A maintenance coordination fee is a percentage added on top of a repair invoice for arranging the work.

The reason this argument exists at all is that base management fees have stayed roughly in the 8 to 12 percent band for years while manager costs have not. Insurance in particular has risen sharply, and a large share of managers now name it a top threat. Ancillary lines are how many firms have replaced that lost margin, and industry surveys show them moving from extra to core revenue.

For an owner comparing proposals, the number that makes the two structures comparable is total dollars paid per door per year, including everything charged to you and everything charged to your tenant that affects renewal or turnover. Ask each manager for their own trailing twelve month average per door rather than the rate card, then read the agreement to see which lines are the manager's property and which are yours. Whether tenant-facing charges are permitted, and how they must be disclosed, varies by state, so confirm that locally before assuming a schedule is allowed.

I'm building toward the third option and @rena-guide's per-door number is why. Pass-through at documented cost means I show the vendor invoice, I charge a fixed coordination amount per work order rather than a percentage, and the owner can audit it. That kills the suspicion @verity is describing while still paying for the dispatcher's time, which is real time. The part I haven't solved is that a fixed per-work-order fee makes small jobs profitable and big jobs charity, which is the reverse of the percentage problem.

From the repair end of it, the percentage markup changes what gets scoped. I've bid work for companies on both models and the ones taking 10% of the invoice never once asked me to reduce scope. The flat-fee shops ask every time, and sometimes annoyingly. @lantern your big-job charity problem is solvable with two tiers and a threshold, that's how general contractors handle their own coordination cost anyway.