Is my property manager taking advantage of me?

[James Cerasoli]

Hey all,

I purchased my first rental property May of last year that is a 3-unit student rental. I found a property manager through the attorney I worked with in the area who claimed he uses him on his own properties and that he's an excellent handyman so I thought that would be perfect considering I'm about 6 hours away. 

My partner and I were shocked when we received our first "quarterly" bill as we only had a 10% maintenance allocation and this bill exceeded that by almost 3X, totaling to $1985 and that absolutely killed our cash flow for the first 3 months. Following this, we had a talk with him telling us to run large purchases and optional repairs by us and the next two quarterlies were much lower but the items he was charging us for were still dubious.

Now onto the most recent quarter when 3 of the 5 tenants moved out, he hits us with a bill for an absurd amount of $2762 on top of a single bedroom we had him renovate that came out to a total of $4621. We already pay him $360 (12%) a month for his management fee so I don't know what this is paying for because he found tenants at the absolute last minute, never asked us if we wanted to increase rents or bill back utilities, never shared us the rental listings and never showed us any pictures he took to advertise the property. And so far, the tenants he found are headaches and he's coming to us with all of their problems.

Here are the quarterly bills and the bill he gave us for the room renovation. I have zero experience with construction and repair costs so please let me know if anything seems inflated. And I want to know if I need to get used to all these charges (especially with a student rental) and take them into account for future properties or if my property manager is in fact taking advantage of us.

Room RenovationQ4, 2019Q3, 2019Q2 2019 and turnover costsQ2 2020 and turnover costs