Owner Maintenance Training Overview
Well, welcome back. Thanks for downloading this package. We appreciate it. This is kind of the training side of the idea of how to keep an owner out of maintenance, a problem we all deal with in the management of bus, of, of this business. We've got truly important documents for you to download.
And then we've got these three training videos while we're down to get some of the weeds on how we kind of got them out of considering doing any maintenance. Now, I'm not suggesting in this series at all that you should welcome owners to do their own maintenance or not. Our goal is to talk them out of it and then put some tripping points in the way so that they really understand the seriousness of what they're doing and realizing that they should rethink it and turn it over to us. And we did that very successfully after about 15 or 20 years of not doing it so successfully. So, we wrestled with it for a long time and finally with Monica's help kind of figured it out.
Owner Involvement Issues
So let's talk through about some of these training issues. Now, just to review the problem, the problem is that owners feel permission to do maintenance on their house. They're trying to save money. It creates a lot of chaos and it adds to your risk and their risk. So the question we're trying to solve is how do I 12 owners out of doing their own maintenance?
We said in the first video, step one is to get your thinking straight about owner's involvement. And along that line, we said there's a couple of starting points. There's kind of an anchor here, and the anchor is we don't co-manage. You're gonna say that to owners a thousand times when they say, we want to do this, we want to do this, we want to do this. I want Uncle Louie and I've got a brother-in-law.
I've got a friend who's an air conditioning condenser, an air conditioning man, and gee, I've had the same furnace guy for 20 years. I want him to do it, blah, blah, blah. You hear that all the time. He, the anchor is we don't co-manage. And secondly, you can't separate management and maintenance.
We kind of, the attitude is if I'm gonna manage it, I'm gonna oversee maintenance. If it gets over 500 bucks or if it's, if it's not an emergency, we'll get in touch, have a conversation with you, but if you're gonna turn it over to me managed, you're gonna turn it over to me to handle maintenance. That's kind of the front end.
Management Agreement and Expectations
Now again, we've had some managers who say, we never, ever would allow under any conditions. So there are some of you out there that have just said, absolutely not. We won't do it. And I was there for a while because the owners create a lot of chaos. And then I ran into some situations where we thought it was per, per perfectly reasonable to let the owner oversee the maintenance issues.
And I'll tell you why in a minute. number two, we said set the right expectations during onboarding what the, what you can say. Now, here's the way we set it in our management agreement. 'cause that's kind of where you start this conversation. We said in the management agreement that property manager management, Mr owner property management includes three things, renting the property, managing the tenant, and managing normal maintenance breakdown.
Now, we kinda said, if we can solve this with our feet up in, in the office with the air conditioning and a cup of coffee in our hands by calling a vendor and sending 'em out, that's normal maintenance breakdown. It's just things that break because of use. That's not dead shrubs, that's not trim. Paint the exterior of the house. It's not replace an air conditioning condenser or a hot water heater.
You gotta go to the house and meet a vendor and pick a model and pick a color and all that kind of stuff. That's not normal maintenance breakdown. That's usually gets up into the higher priced items, but we use this language in the management agreement and ancillary documents to get them to start thinking we handle normal maintenance breakdown. Now that discussion carries over a little further when you talk about spending limits in your owner presentation because you should talk about, owner reserve and spending limits and just say to the owner, look, we know we gotta go out and be able to spend 3, 4, 500 bucks on your behalf without having a conversation with you.
If the air conditioning goes out in Georgia on, on Friday afternoon at six o'clock, we're not waiting till Monday when the owner's back in the office. And if the owner's on a trip, it really doesn't matter. We're gonna go out and take care of it, take care of it. It's a health and safety issue. So you gotta start making distinctions between health and safety issues.
I'm responsible, okay, items that can wait, you know, above 500, that's fine, we'll wait and talk to the owner, but if it's under 500 bucks, we just get it done.
Maintenance Breakdown and Collaboration
And we teach that to the owner during the onboarding process. In other words, you start talking to him about, or her about, here are the things we handle, here are the things that we collaborate together with you. Okay? So owner reserve, you wanna talk about this a lot. Okay?
Now we make a distinction between normal maintenance breakdown and in our management agreement. For those of you who are going through our customized management agreement in this video, you look at paragraph about number seven, and it talks about rehab, renovation, and replacement. These are kind of big ticket items. And so we made a great distinction between normal maintenance breakdown, rehab, renovation, replacement restoration, big ticket items. We dealt with 'em differently.
Normal maintenance breakdown, we just took care of it. Rehab, renovation, replacement, big deferred maintenance projects, new roof, new siding, new air conditioning, that kind of thing. We collaborated with the owner on it. Now, the way we solve this is to say this in our management agreement, right? We do leasing, we manage the tenant, we manage normal maintenance breakdown.
That's how we laid it out in the management agreement.
Scope of Service and Limits
Then we went to a housekeeping document called scope of service and a scope of service document expands on this, talks about, what we cover and what we don't cover. And it's a really important set of documents that you might want to consider. Now, if you're going through our customized management agreements, you already have this package, but if you're watching this on a social media site or something, scope of service kind of says, here's what we do for the a hundred bucks a month. Here's what we don't do as a part of that management, because owners will expect you to do everything related to the property and have that covered by your a hundred dollars month management fee and get all kinds of trouble like that. So you can go to our website.com/scope of service or just look for this graphic and you'll be able to download that and, use that as a part of your
ancillary documents to get the owner to understand what the limits are, are what, what the limits are for your a hundred dollars a month, what do you do? And we cover normal maintenance breakdown, right? And then what we don't do, we don't do renovation, rehab restoration, we're happy to do that, but there's a fee attached to it. So that's the separation we made in the management agreement. So the way you address this initially is in the owner presentation and in your documents.
You set that up correctly on your next owner signups. You'll have a lot easier time with owners trying to be involved in maintenance. We got two more videos on this topic. Keep watching.
