Property management
How maintenance works
Maintenance is where an owner most needs to trust their manager. Here is exactly how we handle it on the properties we manage — including the two numbers that govern it.
- Approval limit
- $600
- Under it, we dispatch and tell you. At or over it, you approve first.
- Maintenance reserve
- $600
- Held so vendors are paid the same week — which keeps us at the front of their schedule.
We troubleshoot first
Tenants reach us directly, including on a 24-hour emergency maintenance line, and we act as your first line of defense. We troubleshoot the call ourselves before dispatching anyone — diagnosing something as simple as a tripped breaker over the phone saves you an electrician’s service call.
The $600 approval limit
Under $600, we approve the repair and dispatch a vendor ourselves, then let you know. Waiting on a reply for a routine repair only slows the fix down, and a tenant waiting on a repair is not a happy tenant.
At $600 or more, we get your approval before any work starts.
The exception: genuine safety emergencies
Some things can’t wait for a phone call to be returned. For these we can spend over the $600 limit to mitigate the emergency — we dispatch first and contact you right after:
- A gas smell
- Active flooding or a burst pipe
- A sewage backup
- No water at all
- No heat in freezing weather, or no AC in dangerous heat
- An electrical hazard
- A broken exterior door or window
The $600 maintenance reserve
We hold a $600 maintenance reserve so we can pay vendors the same week they finish the job. Good tradespeople are busy, and the clients who pay them quickly are the ones who get called back first. When your tenant has no hot water, that is the difference between tomorrow and next week.
Our vendors while a tenant is in place
While the property is tenant-occupied, all maintenance goes through our vendors rather than an owner’s own contractor. North Carolina requires a landlord to make the repairs needed to keep a rental fit and habitable (G.S. 42-42), and we’re the ones answering to the tenant for how quickly that happens — so the work has to go to people we can dispatch, schedule and hold to the job.
What you’ll see
- A notification for every maintenance work order
- Bills and monthly owner statements through your online owner portal
- Quarterly inspections that catch what tenants never report
The cheapest repair is the one caught early. That’s the reason for our quarterly inspections.
Want this on your property?
Tell us about it and we’ll come back with what it should rent for.