Property managers often run in-house maintenance teams at a loss because they undercharge and can't keep technicians busy. A technician needs roughly 100 doors to stay fully utilized, and only markets with 500+ homes justify keeping staff in-house. Below that scale, outsourcing costs less.
I mean, on the maintenance part, most property managers who run in-house maintenance do not make money on it. They don't charge enough, they don't keep their utilization rate high enough. Most of them are breakeven or losing money. And if you are losing money on maintenance, you're basically paying your owners to maintain their properties. You're subsidizing their rental properties, which is insane. So no one should operate an in-house maintenance division at a loss. I don't get that at all.
I agree. And, and I'll just add for real quick context, we only have in-house maintenance in markets where we have 500 homes or more, right? So if I have a market with 70 doors, we're using vendors and we're coordinating those vendors and doing that because to your point, it does not make sense for us. We can't utilize a tech enough. And if you're someone's second or third job, they're, they're not reliable. So we go a different route.
Well, you should be able to keep a tech busy with about 100 doors full-time. Take one of your markets where you have like 200 doors and look at your total maintenance spend across all your properties. You can usually absorb about half of that, move about half of it in-house.
