Three proposals on 11 doors, and the cheapest headline is the most expensive

I'll defend the B model since nobody else will. My shop is priced closer to that shape and here's why. Base fee revenue per door has not moved in five years and my insurance renewal came in 26% higher in one cycle. Labor is up, materials are up, and the average turn costs me around $1,750 in coordination time and vendor scheduling that nobody wants to pay hourly for. If I priced everything into a single 10% number I'd have to charge 14% and owners would walk on the headline.

The RBP is the part people get angriest about and it's the part I'd actually keep. Mine bundles filter delivery, renters insurance compliance, and on-time payment reporting. It cuts my HVAC calls meaningfully and it cuts uninsured water damage claims. Whether $48 is the right price for that is a fair fight. Whether the concept is a scam, no.

parcel, the question I'd ask B is what percentage of their revenue is base fee versus everything else. If base is under half, they're a transaction business wearing a management business costume and your 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?

ember, because a work order is real dispatch labor. Somebody takes the call, diagnoses over the phone well enough to send the right trade, gets the vendor scheduled, gets access arranged with the tenant, follows up when the vendor no-shows, then approves the invoice and codes it. From the construction side I can tell you that's 40 minutes minimum on a simple one and two hours on anything with access problems. Charging for it is defensible. Charging for it AND taking 10% of the invoice is double dipping, and parcel, that's the piece of B I'd push back on directly. 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.

From inside the business, a few things to ask B that will tell you more than the fee sheet.

What is your average days to lease over the last 12 months, by property type, and can you show it out of your software rather than from memory. What percentage of your leases renew. What is your average time to first response on a maintenance request. What is your 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 your net than the 1.3 points sextant just corrected you on, because a 25 day difference in days to lease on 3 turns a year is roughly $3,000 of rent, which is bigger than the entire fee spread.

On the RBP, ask what happens if a tenant refuses it. If the answer comes back that it's mandatory in the lease, price it as rent like you already did, and then ask whether your rents can carry $48 more in your submarket. Sometimes they can't and you find out 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. I run a small team on the service side and I'd say be suspicious of anything reported as a clean round number.

parcel, the thing I'd weigh is which shop you can actually get on the phone in year three, after they've grown. I've watched two local managers 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.