My largest financial estimate "miss" over my first 4 deals.

[Nick Horob]

In the last 18 months, my partner and I have bought 4 properties (24 units) in Fargo, ND or Moorhead, MN ("twin" cities).  

In my initial financial models, I was using 10% of gross rents as an estimate of ongoing maintenance/capex.  So far, just our maintenance requests are costing us 14% of gross rents.  This is 2x what I thought it was going to be.

A couple questions.

• How does this compare to you?
• Is there software available to view maintenance on a per unit and a per "event type" basis (eg. I'd like to see how many leaky faucets we've had over the last year, etc).  I'd like more visibility into our costs than on a per building basis.
• Do you know of any maintenance-specific mobile apps that allow tenants to report issues, dispatch issues to maintenance personal, notify tenants of the status of their requests, and get feedback from the tenant when it's finished?

Thanks in advance.

Nick

[Anish Patel]

@Nick Horob I would say Maintenance will always be higher initially unless your buying something new, but should lower as time goes by.  My older Multi Units in the City always have higher maintenance than my single family properties in the suburbs, so its not easy to compare apples to apples in a sense.  Personally, I don't think anyone needs to get that granular on their costs as the time it would take to track it, probably doesn't have an output that is as beneficial.  Break it down into broader categories, plumbing, electrical, handyman etc... on a per unit basis.  You can do your accounting on a unit basis instead and setup appropriately in quickbooks or a management software like buildium or cozy.  We use buildium and you can definitely make a tenant portal and allow them to send in requests etc...  I"m sure cozy has similar items, they are free and would be a great thing to start with.  One other thing you might want to do is get a free google voice number and use that for all your tenants to report issues.  When you get a message it will send you a text and you can route issues that way instead.  We get magnets made and stick them on the fridge with our number.