help: sensitive tenant with HIGH maintenance cost

[Joe Kim]

Question:  

#1 What to do with a "sensitive" tenant who is requesting a lot of maintenance on my property which is being managed by a property manager?

#2 How do I know if this is due to a "bad" property, poor rehabing, or if this is just part of routine maintenance?

#3  What can be done with property management and/or tenant to mitigate these repairs?   If not, then what are my alternatives?

It's been 9 months since I bought my first investment property and I was reviewing the maintenance cost.   I'm getting around $129.72/month.   My monthly gross rent is $1195/month.   So that's close to 11% maintenance expense per month.

I'm assuming that this is not terribly high in terms of total cost.  However, the frequency of maintenance cost is really alarming.   The tenant has asked for repairs approximately 2-3 times a month consistently for the entire 9 months!

It is currently being management by property management and I did not have any role in finding this tenant or involved in any manner regarding these repairs.

Several of the repair requests are due to electrical problems but it also ranges in problems with disposal, add freon to air-conditioning, Porch fiberglass panels blew off in high winds, etc..    So far most of these problems seem reasonable.   Maybe the tenant is not "sensitive" but really on top of any repairs required?  But then the frequency of requests should decrease, no?

I want to be proactive before the annual lease renewal.   Do I wait and see- one more year with this tenant.  What can I do to better assess the situation better?

I have 5 other properties, all of which have not had the frequency of repairs that I have faced with this property.   

[Steve Babiak]

Originally posted by @Chris Kennedy:

... Stress the issue that the more unnecessary maintenance requests you receive and the more minor items that you have to pay someone to fix, the greater their rent increase will be.

...

The approach in this quoted excerpt will have the desired effect of reducing tenant maintenance and repair requests because the tenants do fear increases in rent. It will also have the side effect of necessary repairs getting ignored by the tenant since asking for the repair will lead to a rent increase. Imagine what that little roof leak turns into ...