Comparing property management fee structures on a small door count, where the cheapest headline isn't the cheapest total

There is a case for the B model that is worth making. Base fee revenue per door has not moved much in five years across the industry, while insurance renewals have climbed sharply in single cycles. Labor and materials are both up, and a realistic turn commonly runs around $1,750 in coordination time and vendor scheduling that nobody wants to pay for hourly. Bundling everything into a single 10% number tends to force the headline rate up toward 14%, and owners walk on the headline. The RBP style fee is the part that draws the most complaints and is also the part worth keeping. A well built version bundles filter delivery, renters insurance compliance, and on time payment reporting. Done properly it cuts HVAC calls meaningfully and reduces uninsured water damage claims. Whether $48 is the right price for that is a fair argument. Whether the concept itself is a scam, no. The better question to put to a B style manager is what percentage of their revenue is base fee versus everything else. If base is under half, that firm is a transaction business wearing a management business costume, and interests diverge every time something breaks.

Been trying to make sense of this one for a while. Why would a manager charge for coordinating maintenance at all? Isn't coordinating maintenance the thing you're hiring them for?

Take a case with 11 doors, average rent $1,200, gross scheduled $13,200 a month. Normalize against a history of roughly 3 turns a year, 25 work orders a year, about $9,000 in annual maintenance spend, and 5 renewals. A work order is real dispatch labor. Someone takes the call, diagnoses over the phone well enough to send the right trade, gets the vendor scheduled, arranges tenant access, follows up on a no-show, then approves and codes the invoice. On the construction side, that's 40 minutes minimum on a simple one and two hours on anything with access problems. Charging a flat fee for that labor is defensible. Charging that fee and taking 10 percent of the invoice on top is double dipping, and that's the piece worth pushing back on directly when comparing management proposals. Pick one.

The 10% invoice markup does something else nobody's said. As a vendor, I know which shops mark up, because they ask me to quote higher so their markup lands under a round number. Your $900 line is probably $1,200 of real cost.

Solder that's grim and also exactly what I wanted to know about how this industry actually earns.

Parcel, on the automation point, does B answer the phone fast because they built systems or because they have three more staff? Those age very differently. The shops using AI for triage and leasing responses can hold response times as they grow doors. The ones holding it up with headcount get slower the month they sign 200 units, and you never get told.

Your math is arithmetically clean and the base is wrong. You normalized both on 8% and 10% of collected rent but you're dividing by gross scheduled. If you run 6% economic loss between vacancy, concessions and delinquency, collected is about $148,900, so A's fee is $14,894 not $15,840 and B's is $11,915 not $12,672. The gap between them narrows to about 1.3 points of gross rather than 1.5. Doesn't change your ranking, does change how much you should care. The more important thing: A at one guy plus a bookkeeper on 11 of your doors, what's his total door count? If he's at 60 doors he has no bench, and the day he's in the hospital your collections stop. I'd rather pay 12.6% to a shop with redundancy than 11.1% to a single point of failure, and I say that as someone who normally votes for the cheaper number. Ask A directly what happens to my rent roll if he's out for three weeks. The answer is usually a long pause.

A few questions to put to option B that will say more than the fee sheet. What is the average days to lease over the last 12 months, by property type, pulled from the software rather than from memory? What percentage of leases renew? What is the average time to first response on a maintenance request? What is the delinquency rate at day 10 of the month? A shop that can produce those four numbers in a day is running a business. A shop that can't is running a phone. That matters more to net income than a 1.3 point fee difference, because a 25 day difference in days to lease on three turns a year is roughly 3,000 dollars of rent, bigger than the entire fee spread. On a mandatory resident benefits package, worth asking what happens if a tenant refuses it. If it's mandatory in the lease, price it as rent, and then check whether the rents in that submarket can actually carry the extra amount. Sometimes they can't, and that surfaces at renewal.

Went through this thread a second time. Is trellis's days-to-lease number something owners can normally get, or do you have to be a big client to ask?

Rigging, any owner can ask and most shops will give it. Whether it's true is another thing. Anyone running a small team on the service side would say be suspicious of anything reported as a clean round number. Parcel, the thing worth weighing is which shop you can actually get on the phone in year three, after they've grown. It's a common pattern for a local manager to go from great to unreachable within 18 months of signing an institutional client, because 300 doors of one owner beats 11 doors of you every time. Ask B what share of their portfolio is their largest single owner. Over 30% and you're the one who gets deprioritized when something has to slip.

I've been reading this thread trying to work out whether I want to be on the management side at all and I'm coming away less sure. Thatch's post lays out the economics without dressing them up and it still reads like a business where you defend your pricing every single month. Parcel, whichever one you pick, would you post the 12 month follow up? I want to see whether the automated shop or the one guy actually held up.