Nobody ever wrote down the turn standard. $11,400 across four units.

I don't think the missing scope doc is the whole cause. You handed a fresh rehab to a shop with in-house maintenance and a coordination fee on outside vendors, which means their incentive on every decision is to do the work themselves and to do more of it. The scope document constrains that at the margin, it doesn't change the direction it pushes.

When I've had this problem the thing that fixed it was making my own vendors mandatory for anything over a trip charge, with the manager coordinating and getting paid a flat dispatch fee for the coordination. They hated it, one shop declined the business, and the one that took it was cheaper across the board for two years running.

Also $89 an hour for in-house maintenance labor isn't outrageous where I am, but on a carpet replacement in a unit that's 11 months old the question isn't the rate, it's why it was replaced. Did you ever get an answer on that one?

Mostly lurking and confused by most threads here, but this one I follow. So the agreement was written correctly and the number that mattered was a number nobody wrote down anywhere? That's the part I'll remember.

Small portfolio here and this is exactly the thing that breaks as you add units, because you stop reading individual work orders around door 12 and start reading monthly totals.

One cheap control that caught this for me: I ask for a work order register export every month, all lines, and I sort by unit. Anything with more than three lines in a 30 day window gets a look. Takes ten minutes and it found a shop billing me for two separate lock changes on the same unit six weeks apart.

Where I'd push back on your own diagnosis, harrow, is the move-in condition report. You listed it last as a fix but I'd put it first. Without dated photos at move-in, none of the departing tenant's damage was chargeable to their deposit, so everything landed on you regardless of what the scope document said. Deposit charge rules and the deadlines for itemizing them vary by state and some are unforgiving about documentation, so that report is what decides who pays. The scope doc controls the size of the bill. The condition report controls whose bill it is.