Hey, everybody. Matthew Whitaker with gkhouses back with Question Owners Ask Denver Property Managers. Today’s question is, “How Much Do You Charge For Maintenance For My Denver Rental Home?” So, maintenance is a big thing that people wanna know. It’s obviously a big expense item that if you can keep maintenance down, it makes that investment.
It makes that return a whole lot better. It is literally just cash out of your pocket when you have to pay for a maintenance item.
So, understanding how we charge for maintenance items is super, super, super important.
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Now, if you’re looking for specific rates, we are going to be happy to tell you that. But I’m not going to tell you that on this video.
I’m going to tell you how we look at it, how we see it. And then you can contact us for specific rates, like today’s rates.
Because they do vary from time to time, as you know, based on gas and a bunch of different factors – how hard the labor market is.
But let me go in and tell you all about how maintenance gets charged.
The first thing is based on… Let’s just talk about a common maintenance work order.
These are traditionally charged by an hourly rate. Now, our hourly rate varies, based on the type of work it is.
Now, is it common handyman maintenance stuff, that’s charged out at the cheapest hourly rate.
Is it something that requires a license like a plumber, a heating and air tech or an electrician, if it’s one of those that requires a license, then that’s going to be charged at a higher rate because obviously, there are certain licensing and requirements we have with the state.
Now, one of the cool things that you need to know about evernest when you use us for your maintenance is, we are licensed and insured.
And if something were to happen to that technician on your property, it would fall under our insurance. We have workers comp.
And from time to time we do have maintenance people that get injured. We just had a guy hurt his shoulder at a house.
So, we were able to use our worker’s comp to get him better and pay his bills.
But the point being, we have all the requirements, and that’s not something that you need to worry about. That’s kind of our normal maintenance stuff.
The second piece of normal maintenance is the materials. And we do charge, and most companies do charge a mark-up on the materials.
So, you know, we might have the materials on our truck. We might have the materials on our van and we’ll charge that out at a mark-up.
Some of that’s carrying costs. Some of that’s storing costs. But point is, it’s better for us to have it on the van because it keeps us from having to go get it.
But the point being too is that common maintenance is materials and labor.
The last thing I would say is bid jobs. Now, this falls into two categories.
The first one is, if we think that a going to maintenance item is going to go over $500, we’re going to bid that work and give you a set price on what it’s going to cost to get that done. So, that’s bid work around maintenance.
The second piece of bid work is around what we call “the turn.” So, if a tenant moves out, there’s typically a punch list that needs to be done.
Some of that’s maybe tenant-caused, but some of that could be just deferred maintenance. So, we will bid that work to you, give you a number.
And as long as nothing major happens, like we don’t tear up a floor and there’s a bunch of rotten wood we didn’t know about, then you’re just going to pay one price for that.
And that’s, you know, 99% of the work orders. So, that’s it. I hope that was super helpful. I’m Matthew Whitaker with gkhouses.
Spencer is the VP of Marketing at Evernest. He wakes up with Google and Facebook on his mind. Having bought and sold over 150 homes in Birmingham, Spencer gets a kick out of helping new and seasoned investors navigate the mistakes he made as an investor. Spencer is also passionate about his love for Michael Jordan and does his best to explain to the Millennials (who never saw him play live) how much better he was than LeBron. He loves to hang out with his wife, kids, and the world’s best black lab, Jett.