Quoted a flat placement fee the authority's calendar then took entirely

Halyard, did the owner understand he wasn't collecting anything for those 71 days? Because in my experience the person who's genuinely paying for the delay is the one holding the vacant unit, and if he'd priced that himself he might have paid you hourly without blinking. He was probably comparing your 500 to what a market lease-up costs him, which is the wrong comparison.

Loose stair tread and detector placement are 90 minutes of work if someone looks before the inspector does. On the renovation side I've learned that the failure isn't the repair, it's that nobody walked the unit with the list in hand first. Scope creep works the same way, you find things late and pay retail for the timing.

The pricing structure is the whole problem and it's separable from everything else in your post.

A flat fee is a bet that your labor per unit is roughly fixed. That's true when you control the sequence. Here the sequence has three other parties in it, and every one of them can add a two week loop that costs you hours and costs you nothing to have caused. You wrote an unhedged option and sold it for 500.

Two ways out. Either you charge hourly or on a monthly retainer so the drag transfers back to the person who benefits from the unit being occupied, or you keep the flat fee and cap your exposure explicitly, something like a fee that covers submission through first inspection with a defined additional amount per reinspection cycle. The second version is easier to sell because it still reads as a fixed price to the owner and it prices the thing that actually varies.

The form error is a symptom of the same structure. Under a flat fee you have every incentive to accept the owner's documents fast and no compensation for auditing them. Under an hourly arrangement, the two hours you spend reconciling his lease against the utility allowance is billable and it saves everyone 15 days.

And tender's right that he'd probably have paid. A vacant unit at even 900 a month is 2,100 of lost rent over those 71 days. He wasn't shopping on your 500.

This is helping me work out what I actually want to be doing. I'd assumed the service side was more predictable than owning. Halyard, if you'd been paid hourly at your normal rate for those 90 hours, would you still want the work?

We manage a mix and voucher lease-ups get their own fee schedule for exactly the reasons sable laid out. One thing I'd add from the management side: build the reinspection follow-up into your process as a named step with an owner they've already approved, so when it fails you're not negotiating a repair while the clock runs. Also keep every submission dated in writing. Twice now the authority's file and ours disagreed about when something arrived, and the dated email settled it both times.