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Performing Rental Property Maintenance Like A Professional in Sacramento

Rental property maintenance requires responsiveness, budgeting, and a great network of professional vendors and contractors. All of us work at Sacramento Delta Property Management to ensure the properties we manage are well-maintained. Today, we’re talking a bit about our process as a professional property management company.

Working with Trusted Vendors

You need to always be on the lookout for good vendors. In our industry, if someone hears about a great vendor, everyone tries to get to them and they get booked up quickly. We’re constantly looking for competitive rates with our vendors, and we do work with some awesome long-term vendors. Many of our maintenance partners have even been with us for over 35 years. Some will only work with Sacramento Delta and smaller companies. This makes it easier to keep the rates low. They don’t have to advertise or market themselves because they get enough business from us.

Maintenance costs are always on the rise. We do our best to keep costs contained, but there is always inflation, and repairs and parts are not going to cost what they did five years ago. Many of our owners benefit from our discounted pricing negotiations with our best vendors. When you work with us, you get a much better price than you would if you were self-managing or getting your management services elsewhere.

Invoicing transparency is important to property managers. As an owner, you’ll receive the original invoice with the exact information from the vendor. There is no hiding anything and we don’t have any hidden costs or upcharges. The owner gets the exact original invoice and we only keep a copy of it for our records. Transparency is important and so is documentation. We like for each property to have a detailed record of exactly when and how things were repaired.

Comparing Maintenance Prices

We also have a long list of licensed and insured contractors to choose from for our bigger ticket items. We will always get second or third opinions when necessary. These vendors are insured and licensed and bonded, so if something is not done completely or correctly, we can always go back to them and have it handled. They are liable for the work that they do, and a lot of times we won’t even pay an invoice until we get a clear photo of the completed work.

For larger projects, we keep things as cost-effective for our owners as possible. We are always looking for ways to save money for our clients because at the end of the day, we want the best-case scenario.

It’s not uncommon for our clients to send one of their own vendors out to get an estimate after we have provided our own estimates. Usually, our vendors are more affordable.

Gathering competing quotes isn’t always possible. If it’s an emergency and a new furnace or HVAC system needs to be repaired immediately, we get it done because it’s a habitability issue. We can’t have tenants without a place to live.

In-House Maintenance is not Always Best

In-house maintenance is always an interesting process for repairs, and it has both benefits and drawbacks. There can be some pretty high bills when companies use their own maintenance teams. Having a neutral third party take care of these repairs will provide more accountability. And, it reduces liability.

The main goal is to get the item fixed, not to make additional money off our owners. Upcharges and additional fees just for coordinating maintenance is not something we agree with as a company. This is included in your management fee and should not be charged additionally.

We are very transparent, and we are never going to throw in hidden fees, especially for maintenance. Our clients also appreciate getting to know our vendors. They know our HVAC guy or our plumbing guy and they know they can trust the work.

At Sacramento Delta, we have a motto that deals with the four “F-s”. Those F-s are: