All Forum Posts by: Michael Sager

Hello,

Currently interested in understanding what the best maintenance strategy would be for my situation. To give some background, my family owns a 52-unit, 14 story apartment building on the north side of Chicago. We currently pay a maintenance guy $2K/month to cover general maintenance. He is on call and lives close by so he can be here if anything time sensitive happens, but mostly he works on general upkeep. 

In addition to his $2K/month salary, we pay him and his crew for larger projects- painting apartments, rebuffing/refinishing floors/getting units ready for new tenants. 

The 2 questions I have:

1. Am I getting a fair deal? being a family owned business, I don't have much experience with others in similar situations. Sometimes I feel like he is not doing enough for the $2K/month, since he sometimes isn't even around the building and we get charged incrementally for larger projects, however he has been a lifesaver during emergencies (burst pipes in the winter, boiler issues). To clarify, he doesn't do any of the cleaning or trash removal. We have a separate crew for that.

2. We sometimes have issues asking him to take care of general maintenance and minor projects and he has to be reminded multiple times. Any ideas for systems that could alleviate this?

Thanks for your help!

North Side around lakeview. After doing some research, I've found a few resources in www.coverwell.com and some craigslist leads. If anyone has any history with coverwell or has any references, it would be greatly appreciated!

Hello!

My family owns a 15 story, 54 unit apartment building in Chicago, and our current cleaning "crew" consists of a woman who lives in the building with significantly discounted rent as a trade for cleaning public areas + taking the trash out to the alley from each floor every other day. Unfortunately, she is leaving the building, which leaves us with no cleaning resource. Looking for recommendations on where to look/what prices to expect for this type of service. I have included her detailed duties below:

1. cleaning lobby, common areas and stairwells

2. taking the trash from each floor and bringing it down to they alley

3. cleaning empty apartments when tenants move out

Thanks!